I need my iOS app to be able to play a very short sound at regular intervals while my app is in the background. I must support almost any duration/interval time. One example would be a one-second sound, played every 3 seconds for 45 minutes.
I've found an app in the App Store which can do exactly this. (On iOS15). Though from what I've read, this is not possible, outside of creating a 45 minute audio file on the fly, and using background audio to play the clip. (Though not sure Apple wouldn't reject even this.)
Any ideas how this app achieves this? Maybe they're creating an audio file?
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I've been googling for a long time about how to run code in the background for IOS, and for what I have come up with the short answer is that you can't. And the long answer that you can but is limited. I've seen similar apps to the one I am creating so I feel like there should be a way to make it.
So on to the actual app I want to create. I want to create an application that will continuously play a random sound from a list in between a set interval, let's say for this example 30-60 seconds. So randomly every 30<t<60 seconds a sound should play. You can think of it as a positive affirmations app that should play positive affirmations throughout the day. I've seen such apps exist for IOS, I haven't tried them but I assume they should work like that? And when the app is firing the code to play the sound, Ideally I also want it to send information to a server.
I am using "Flutter Background Service" and "AudioPlayer" packages and have gotten a very very early demo version to work on android where it plays the sound after a random amount of time. And now I want it to work for Iphones also. Since it's not a playlist, I can't use the inbuilt functions for IOS that allows media players to run in the background. For what I can understand is that no code can run for longer then 30 seconds on IOS from when the app goes to the background, or the screen locks. And you can't run background tasks more often then every 15 minutes, or 3 minutes for small work. But that is way to long for the use case I want. I'd want to be able to run the function every 10 seconds to maybe 1 minute at the latest.
So I am wondering, is there a way to get such an application to work for IOS? It feels like it should be possible somehow. I don't really care if you have to "play dirty" to achieve it, and I don't know if it matters or not but I am not planning on publishing the app to the app store. It will only be a private app for me and a few friends.
One way I've been thinking about is maybe use push notifications from a server to trigger it. But I'd rather not have to resort to this if I can help it, if it even is possible to have a push notification to run code/trigger functions in the background?
I'm making a metronome app and use AKSamplerMetronome class. I did synchronization between devices with Ableton link so they could play together. I start playing and after a while sound on the device starts to delay and after couple of minutes I can clearly hear it.
The thing is beat count synchronized correctly but the sound that comes from the phone is not.
This bug is not on all devices, on some of them it's working great, no delay.
for synchronization I call setBeatTime once on start
Any suggestions what it might be?
If I create instance of AKSamplerMetronome, wait for couple minutes and then play, sound immediately would be out of sync.
I'd like to play a sound periodically while the app is in the background but after doing some research it's not certain if this is possible. Before I give up or waste too much time trying I want to double check with the community if this is really possible or not.
I figured out how to enable playing sounds while the app is in the background but the app is still eventually killed and the timer stops firing (there's a 10 minute period it runs in suspended mode if I use beginBackgroundTask: but that's not enough). Other ideas I had:
1) There appears to be a "background fetch" mode which could maybe be used like a timer but this is a hack and may be rejected by Apple.
2) Loop blank audio in the background or some other looping part of audio API's to keep the app alive? Again Apple may reject that even it's possible.
3) Enable the location API to keep the app alive and play audio. Hack again, bad for battery and Apple 99% will reject this.
4) I read somewhere that push notifications could work for this but that requires a complicated server backend and if it's possible that last resort.
Are any of those methods viable or are there others?
You can use scheduled Local Notifications with sounds.
I'm developing an background (daemon) application that will schedule a task on an exact time. For example, do something at 3 PM, or it can be do something after 3 hours. I've tried NSTimer and scheduling NSThread, but it does not do the task at the time I schedule because iPhone is in deep sleep.
Note that this is an application on a jail-broken device and run as a daemon, so it doesn't have UIApplication instance.
I had the same problem with my daemon. I couldn't find any working method for scheduling device wakes. Instead I prevent it from ever falling in a deep sleep by infinitely playing audio file with silence. That way you don't need IOKit to cancel sleep and your device will stay awake. I can't find the code now but it's very simple - a few calls to AVAudioPlayer. You also need to setup audio session for audio playing and mixing. It's all public and very well known APIs so there shouldn't be any problems implementing that.
There are problems with it. For example, playing audio file will reroute audio to the device receiver. By default audio is playing through the speaker so you need to take care of that. You also need to detect when the screen is turned on/off because device will not sleep when the screen is turned on. When the screen is turned off you start playing silence. When it's turned on you stop it. That will also solve mixing problems with other apps that are trying to play audio.
Unfortunately I don't have any code with me right now to show you some examples. I can add the code later if need it.
I have written a music player app, and I am trying to add a feature to save all the information I possibly can about the current playing song when the audio stops or the app is quit (some examples are when library updates occur, or the song changes in the background). The goal is to be able to resume audio (mostly for audiobooks) where the user left off, in any reasonable circumstances.
I have been doing considerable research on methods to keep the app running in some form in the background, but I have not been able to implement any of them successfully.
My Goal:
Respond to playback changes with app in background
What I have:
info.plist entry - UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend = NO
info.plist entry - UIBackgroundModes -> item0 = audio
[MPMusicPlayerController iPodMusicPlayer] is what I am using for playback
App targeting iOS5+iOS6
Questions (basically, is this a fruitless endeavor):
does using iPodMusicPlayer preclude my app from running in the background inherently, since it is not actively actually doing anything in my app?
what method of playback, if any, would keep my app active without potentially having to essentially rewrite a good chunk of it
with the fairly simple goals in mind, are there limits on what can be run in the background that would make them impossible?
Would very much appreciate any help on a direction to take on this.