Music won't play in game, but only when sideloaded

I just released my lo-fi tetris game, Rainblocks, for the Playdate, but I've discovered that the background music doesn't play when the game is sideloaded. It does play when run in the simulator or loaded to my Playdate via the simulator. Why might this happen, and does anyone have any ideas for troubleshooting?

I'm using SDK version 1.12.2 on Linux (ElementaryOS). Also tested building and zipping on Windows 10, same issue.

(And in case it's helpful, here's the Rainblocks source code)

I didn't think it was related, but I tried the setStopOnOverrun(false) trick from this other forum post and it worked. Though I'm still unsure why that would be needed to get the music to start when the game first opens, or why it's only needed when side-loading the game.

If your tracks were stopping on overrun, and it's only happening on device, that could suggest the CPU is under excess load. Are you using ADPCM wav files? They should be a little less CPU intensive for the fileplayer to decode. I also noticed your wav files are pretty big, if they aren't already converted to mono you can save a lot of disk space by doing that.

Thanks, I'll try converting everything to mono. The background tracks are ADPCM wav files, and they do play fine on my device when I upload the game via the simulator - it's just sideloading that's the problem.

Oh I didn't catch that part. That is very strange! Maybe reducing the filesize would fix that, but then again there are plenty of other games with large filesizes that download fine.

Converting the music and sound effects to mono and re-exporting as ADPCM just in case I missed any the first time definitely decreased the file size! I kept in the setStopOnOverrun(false) line just in case, though there's still a few-second delay before the music starts. But at least now it does start, and will hopefully be less resource-intensive.

You know, one thing I could try is only loading the music one track at a time, instead of loading them all at once in setup()...