I find this list of things a user has to do to prevent interuptions of a recording in an audio app appaulling. From AVSession Docs:
Providing Guidelines to the User
A user may not want an app to be interrupted by a competing audio session—for instance, when running an audio recorder to capture a presentation.
There is no programmatic way to ensure that an audio session is never interrupted. The reason is that iOS always gives priority to the phone. iOS also gives high priority to certain alarms and alerts—you wouldn’t want to miss your flight now, would you?
The solution to guaranteeing an uninterrupted recording is for a user to deliberately silence their iOS device by taking the following steps:
- In the Settings app, ensure that Airplane Mode turned on, for devices that have an Airplane mode.
- In the Settings app, ensure that Do Not Disturb is turned on.
- In the Calendar app, ensure that there are no event alarms enabled during the planned recording period.
- In the Clock app, ensure that no clock alarms are enabled during the planned recording period.
- For devices that have a Silent switch (called the Ring/Silent switch on iPhone), do not move the switch during the recording. When you change to Silent mode, an iPhone may vibrate, for example, depending on user settings.
- Do not plug in or unplug a headset during recording. Likewise, do not dock or undock the device during recording.
- Do not plug the device into a power source during the recording. When an iOS device gets plugged into power, it may beep or vibrate, according to the device and to user settings.
A user guide is a good place to communicate these steps to your users.
I understand why the system has been set up this way, but I want to submit a feature request for there to be some way with the AVAudioSession api to request (with the user's input) a "Non interuptaple" session. I understand that this has some side effects but if we want some higher production value apps we need something like this.
I want to just post here fist in hopes of getting some feedback from the wise.
The best way to provide feedback to the Core Audio engineering team is to file a bug report with a good summary of the API feature you are requesting along with as much detail about your specific need for the API. How would your application use an non-interruptible Audio Session for example, why do you need this feature and so on.
All bugs are screened and analyzed by real humans of the engineering variety involved with the specific frameworks pertaining to the request in the report(s), so you shouldn't worry that no one will read it or understand or that we simply punt it - now, you may never hear about your feature request again and that's just the way things work in this world unfortunately - but then again, you may see the feature introduced at a future WWDC.
We are always looking to improve the audio system APIs and developer feedback is a very important and vital component for us to archive this goal.
