Radio paused when playing sound

[Eruk]

Hello,
Does anyone know why the FM radio on Nokia phone is paused (and not started again automatically) when my app is playing a sound? I've seen this on 5800 and N97. I'm using a very simple implmentation of CMdaAudioPlayerUtility. Type of sound format doesn't matter.

Have seen this in all 3rd party apps I have tried so far. Nokias native apps don't seem to have the same problem though, in them the radio continues automatically after a sound has been played.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
/Erik

[Eruk]

Sorry noticed another post about this a bit down in this forum.. no solution it seems like.

[chenziteng]

Hi,

The pause/resume behaviours are defined by a group of audio policies, you can not change the policy but you can change your own audio player utility's priority and preference. For example you can try those used by the built-in music player.

"CMdaAudioPlayerUtility::NewL(..., KAudioPriorityRealOnePlayer, TMdaPriorityPreference(KAudioPrefRealOneLocalPlayback)"
http://developer.symbian.org/xref/os...ayback.cpp#111

Regards

Ziteng Chen

[Eruk]

Hi Ziteng,
Thanks for your reply. Wasn't aware of these priorities, only a few of them are published in the SDK.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter which prio I set, I've tried most of them, but still same issue.

Guess I should try to find the source code that plays the incoming SMS sound and see how Nokia handles it.

Thanks,
/Erik

[Eruk]

I have some new info about this. If I run the application without capability MultimediaDD it works perfectly. Seems like MultimediaDD increases the priority of my application over the Radio app in some way. This still only happen on some 5th edition devices, is it a platform bug perhaps?

[Sorcery-ltd]

The way it was explained to me when I was writing the Symbian multimedia book is that (in contrast to the official documentation which says the priority and preference are ignored if you don't have MultimediaDD) there are effectively two separate sets of priorities - any app with MultimediaDD has higher priority than all apps without, whatever priority they set. That isn't how the interface was designed to be used but it's how Nokia have implemented their audio policy. Unfortunately the audio policy is one of the bits of Symbian adaptation code that Nokia haven't opened the source to (although they did say they'd do so in the next year or so) so you can't find out exactly what's going on.

So, more of a platform "feature" than a bug. You might be able to still have MultimediaDD and set a really low priority, check what the radio app does. In general you shouldn't have MultimediaDD unless you definitely need it!