I'm developing an Windows Phone application, that plays/streams music in background.
To accomplish that, I tried to use both Microsoft.Phone.BackgroundAudio.BackgroundAudioPlayer and Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media.MediaPlayer classes.
In both cases everything worked just fine, so I was wondering, what are advantages/disadvantages of these methods, because now I can't decide which one is better.
The only thing that I don't like in BackgroundAudioPlayer, is that I need to create separate project for audio agent, and worry about transferring track info via IsolatedStorage. But since I've done that already. It's not a problem.
So are there any other differences between those two classes?
It depends on your program. If you want to play your background music only while using your program, you should use MediaPlayer. Otherwise you have to take care of the BackgroundAudioPlayer in any situation. Also this will annoy users, who also want to listen to their own music while using your application.
Otherwise, if your background music is the main purpose of the program, the user would like to start your music and switch to other programs. Then it keeps playing and you can control the music in the volume bar. That's why you have to create a background task for BackgroundAudioPlayer. The main application will stop in both ways when switching to other programs.
In short: game background music should never play after leaving the game (use MediaPlayer) - but I never want to watch my music player counting the time, while listening to my music library (use BackgroundAudioPlayer).
I believe MediaPlayer requires the application to be in the foreground. BackgroundAudioPlayer will let the user start a track, exit your application, and the music will continue to play and the agent can respond to the UVC.
Make sure you use a Mutex when you communicate between the foreground app and the background audio agent.
Related
I am working on a tools app and I need a way to turn on the camera flash when I click a tile, then keep it on in the background and turn it off once I click the tile again.
I don't need any help with the tile yet all I want to know is what I can do to turn on the flash and then keep it on. All the examples I have seen thus far simply pretend to be a camera and then turn the flash on.
Do you know of anything?
PS. I am planning on making this for WP 7 and 8 but if you know of a way that will on work on WP 8 that will also help me a lot.
The simple answer is no.
While the app is running, you can control the camera and turn on the flash. But as soon as you exit the app (Back button) or the app is suspended (due to a phone call or by pressing the Start button), the use of the camera is suspended.
Windows Phone does have Background Agents but these are very limited and do not allow access to the camera API at all (and many other APIs).
I have been struggling with an issue with my media player windows phone (7) application. The problem is that I can't seem to implement playlists.
What I want to do is play songs from the media library. This article seems pointless.
I've tried getting into the SongCollection class and figure out how to create more of these things. It appears to be impossible (no constructor, can't cast it, can't inherit it).
After that I tried getting an object on the process running the background audio agent that existed in my app (until I discovered it was redundant), and feed the media player one song at a time.
Problem is, I don't know when the media player stopped playing. It works ok as long as my app is in the foreground, but when it is not, everything stops working, only the media player keeps going.
Is there a way I haven't figured out? In the article above they suggest there is a link between the Zune Media Queue, which I presume is the MediaPlayer.Queue property, and various things I can implement, but I just can't figure a way to make it go.
You should give up since building your own media player is an impossible mission (been there, done that). You cannot create playlists or edit any information, you cannot replace default event handlers for on-screen music controls, you don't get events for music change in your application unless it is currently running.
Basically, it is really limited in what you can do right now and the situation isn't much better with WP8.
I hope that it will be less read-only by the time we get Windows Phone 9.
Take a look at the UWP samples from Microsoft:
https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-universal-samples
The sample contains play/pause/playlists explanation.
This was already possible in Windows phone 7.5/8/8.1
I have a c#/xaml app. I'd like to play instruction sounds, but if the user is playing background music, I'd like to mute it, or lower the volume temporarily while the sounds are being played.
Currently, I'm using xaudio2 to play my audio in C++, and using some delegates to make calls into C# where I'm using the MediaPlayer class from the xna framework to mute the background media.
However, after pausing the music, when I go to play my instruction through xaudio2, I get System.InvalidOperationException exception from the xna framework. If I comment out the line for playing the sound, there is no exception.
I suppose it's worth noting that this is not happening on the UI thread...
Am I going about this the right way? I can't find any links to information on how to accomplish this - I'm grasping at straws.
It turns out I wasn't calling FrameworkDispatcher.Update() before I called MediaPlayer.Pause(). But this is possible to do if your app requires it.
What would be the easiest way to have a music file included in the App as looped background music while the app is running and the music pauses if the app is suspended and starts up again when the app is brought back to foreground. Don't care about playing for the devices iTunes/Music catalog just one or more included music files within the App bundle.
I don't know if it's the easiest way, but there is some sample code in TweetStation to play audio in your app.
I want to know is there any mechanism by which my C# code knows that application starts. For example when camera or music player starts then my app know each time that camera or other app has started.
No, you cannot listen for when other applications start. You can use Launchers and Choosers to start the Camera from inside your own application, but you cannot listen on other applications.
Anyway, such a application would also be considered spyware.