I have read many posts and still i cannot achieve the desired functionality while my application is suspended in the background.
My reference point is this radio alarm application.
The things i cannot do using local notifications (which are successfully implemented in the radio clock above) are:
play alarm sound in the background while phone is muted
change phone volume.
play mp3 songs.
Also i noticed that they are able to play sounds longer than 30 seconds and even radio as alarm sounds which probably means that local notifications are not being used (audio-wise)
any insight would be appriciated...
The reason that this Radio App succeeds in playing a long audio file , is that it actually plays a background silent loop audio while waiting for the alarm .
IMO that's the reason people complain it drains the battery.
Related
I did a lot of research and couldn't find a proper solution for my problem.
I want to make an iPhone app that plays a custom sound even when it is in background at a certain time (alarm clock app).
I did a research on the following points:
Local Notification -> no sound longer than 30 seconds allowed
Background Audio -> Apple refuses Apps that don't continuously run music in background, also there is no way to trigger sound when receiving a local notification
Is there any way to achieve this, i mean there has to be one.. i found dozens of apps in the app store that support playing sounds from your library even in background, and not only 30 seconds long (this one for instance: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/background-alarm-clock-free/id723243753?mt=8)
If possible in swift.
I have to create an alarm clock app for the iPhone in which user can set alarm time and sound.
In doing so, I have used UILocalNotification to set off the alarm.
Now, in UILocalNotification, first we get Notification Alert with option "Close" and "View". If the user taps on "View", then my delegate receives the application:didReceiveLocalNotification: message and the alarm sound plays.
But in the system-native alarm app, we don't see a notification alert; it just directly plays the alarm sound. How can I have my app use this behavior?
I agree with David. iOS built-in alarm app gets a special treatment from Apple to sound > 30 seconds while in the background. It seems to be using some private API to make it sound for a longer time even when it is in the background or closed. This is not available to other apps built outside of Apple, so don't even try to compete with it. If you buy all Alarm clock apps in the App Store (aka: approved by Apple) and try them one by one, you will see that they lack behind the built-in alarm app in the most important function of an alarm: i.e. "Sounding for a long period, in any state the app is in (active, background, or closed)"
Your best bet to simulate a background alarm is to make use of UILocalNotification for 30 seconds. If you really want to wake up your heavy sleeper, schedule to fire up five of these notifications sixty seconds apart or something like that, in the hopes they will wake up before the 5th notification ends.
Notice that with this method, your user who misses the alarm will get 5 popups on their screen when they wake up (less if they wake up during one of the alarm popups), so they'll be spending their first seconds of their morning closing those popups - not the greatest user experience.
Conclusion: Alarm Clock apps are good for foreground use only. Best Alarm app out there that will work in any state is the built-in Clock app made by Apple.
This alarm behavior is not available to iOS apps. You have the ability to create local notifications and add sounds to them, but the sound length is limited. You cannot have a sound continuously play such as on the built-in alarm.
One option is to repeat the alerts. So your app would send an alert, wait some time then send another. You repeat a specified number of times or until the user interacts with your app. I don't think this would provide a great user experience, so I don't recommend it.
I am pretty sure you can have your own custom local notification sound.
Example code localNotif.soundName = #"alarmsound.caf";
Note local notification sound will have to be of only 30 seconds or less to be played. You can get more info here.
If you enable the "Audio, AirPlay, and Picture in Picture" and "Remote notifications" Background Modes, you can use a silent push notification to wake up the device and then start playing audio, and as long as you’re playing audio you won’t be limited to 30 seconds to respond to the notification like usual. This won’t work if the app has been killed manually by the user, but if the user does that you could send a local notification asking them to re-open the app.
I already know how to keep play music at background in my app.
I don't want to know that.
I want this.
how to Automatically turn on ipot music in background & sleep mode at custom time.
it's thought impossible to me.
but that's possible. and no jail break.
i wanna know that. please help me.
Take a look at the following background task guide from the iOS docs
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/iphone/conceptual/iphoneosprogrammingguide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html
There are restrictions on what can be carried out in the background. Certain apps that support audio, location, and voip are allowed to run in background using the UIBackgroundModes key. With the audio background task, it will not be suspended until the audio session stops.
It seems that you don't want to initiate a session until a certain time. You could potentially look at beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler: .
Also if you are looking for a timed alarm, you can always attach a different tone to a local notification.
As far as I am aware, there is no "out-of-the-box" way to do what your asking.
I'm looking for some way to let my app play a sound at a specific time while it's in the background (IOS4 multitasking). Currently, I use local notifications for that which works quite well, except for:
the sound will not be played if the phone is muted
the 30 second playback limit
I saw there's setKeepAliveTimeout:handler: but it's only available for voip-apps and since that's not the purpose of my app, I guess Apple would reject it because of this. I also saw a solution where an "empty" sound is being played until it's time has been reached, but - ignoring that this is not a very elegant way, anyways - I read that this, too, might get the app rejected.
Since there are a few alarm clock apps that do just what I'm looking for, I wonder how they implemented this functionality.
Thanks for any hints in advance!
If you seek a solution that will be approved by Apple, you're right you can't use the setKeepAliveTimeout:handler and even if you could - you can't set the timeout to something that's smaller than 600 seconds, so I guess it won't be of a great use anyway (besides that It's not guaranteed to fire the event even remotely close to the timeout you specified. For example, I set it to 600 seconds and some event fired as early as 360 seconds..).
About playing the silent sound, except the waste of battery, if you're app has legitimate use for background audio (if you're implementing an alarm clock, that's pretty obvious), I don't see a reason for your app to be rejected, as long as you don't try to use other background features (GPS signal, VoIP handlers, etc).
Here's one example app that used this "feature" for their benefit:
http://tapbots.com/blog/pastebot/pastebot-music-in-background
About other methods, you can look in this thread:
How do I start playing audio when in silent mode & locked in iOS 6?
On a personal note, it's not very easy to cope with background policies of Apple. Me and my company had (have?) a hard time just to maintain a simple VoIP connection due to all the limitations. My best advice is try to do as less as possible in the background as you can. If the UILocalNotificaion solution suits you, you'll probably should stick to it and live with the limitations.
My iPhone application requires that I know when a user has/has not plugged in her headphones. That's easy. AudioSessionAddPropertyListener with a callback listening to kAudioSessionProperty_AudioRouteChange.
I write logs with NSLog as things happen. User plugs the headphones in? Get a notification, and a line in the gdb console. User unplugs the headphones? Ditto.
At the same time I'm sensing the noise level of the environment by starting a recording audio queue. This, too, works great: I can get the mic noise level and listen for audio route changes just fine.
What I find is that after an interruption, and I've reactivated the audio session and restored the audio category to kAudioSessionCategory_RecordAudio, the audio route notifications go a bit haywire.
When I plug in the headphones, I see no notification. When I unplug the headphones I see BOTH the "plugged in" notification AND the "unplugged" notification, in rapid succession.
It's like the "plugged in" notification's delayed and, when the "unplugged" notification arrives, the queue of pending notifications is flushed.
What am I doing wrong? How do I correctly restore the audio session to get timeous notifications?
EDIT: iPhone OS 3.1.2, running on an iPhone 3G. I'm running a program compiled with the 3.0 SDK (from within XCode 3.1.2).
I have the same problem, but more information, and thus questions for you.
Are you using OpenAL for sound like me.
Do you also support iPod music like me.
I get headphone disconnects in quartz menu screens fine, but in the glView game screen it mostly fails like you. Sometimes the first disconnect works, then failure. Sometime the reconnect also fails to fire, so when I switch to quartz screen I get a que of a half dozen disconnect dialogs I have to click on. This is with OpenAL sound.
With iPod music I switch to a NSNotificationCenter MPMusicPlayerControllerPlaybackStateDidChangeNotification notification and that works, but only while the iPod music is playing.
OS 3.1.3 with a build to OS 3.1.0 on iPhone and iTouch.
Look at your return error code from AudioSessionInitialize(), that was my problem, it was not being called first, and failed.
EDIT: Fix failed, it is an intermittent/random issue, seemingly caused by high CPU load.