How to Fix Unity Audio Not Pausing When the Game Pauses at Time Scale Zero

Time scale does not touch audio. To make sounds stop on pause you must pause them yourself, and to keep menu clicks audible you must exclude them from that pause.

How to fix it

1. Pause via AudioListener

Set AudioListener.pause = true on pause to halt all spatialized audio at once; this is independent of Time.timeScale.

2. Mark menu sounds to ignore pause

Set AudioSource.ignoreListenerPause = true on UI/menu sources so button clicks and music still play while gameplay audio is paused.

3. Or pause the mixer/sources

Alternatively snapshot a paused mixer state or call Pause() on the gameplay AudioSources, leaving a separate UI source untouched.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.