CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneobjective-ciosaudioavaudioplayer
ghempton
ghempton

Reputation: 7947

Multitasking: Stop Background Audio at Specific Time

I am developing an iphone app which uses background audio (on an infinite loop) to continue playing after the app has entered the background.

My problem is I want to implement a "sleep timer" which stops playback after a specified period of time.

Is this possible? I have spent an hour looking for a method to do this with no avail.

EDIT: My current thought is to use a lower level API, the Audio Queue Services, and manually re-fill the queue with another instance of the loop during the AudioQueueOutputCallback. If the timer has expired I do not fill the loop. I'm assuming this should work since the documentation says audio callbacks are still fired when an app is playing multitasking background audio. Can anyone think of a better way or a reason why this wouldn't work?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 748

Answers (2)

dgund
dgund

Reputation: 3467

I'm not actually sure this would be allowed in the App Store. An app is not allowed to execute at all in the background, with the exception of VoIP apps and push notifications.

Upvotes: 0

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 2646

While you queue sound data on the background your app remains fully functional and running as if it was in the foreground (well almost), so yes, you should just write a timer that stops the playback at a given time and it will be fired as expected.

Now to the second question: once you stop queueing things up, your app will be "frozen" until the user manually brings it to the foreground... So what you should do is start queueing audio data from the second file before the first one is done playing, and if you DO need to pause or stop, maybe a solution is to play 0 bytes (silence)?

Upvotes: 2

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