Conflict between react-native-audio-toolkit and react-native-track-player

[nathantqn]

Hi guys, really appreciate your efforts in this super cool Audio Toolkit. My below explanation will be long to clarify my current issue, and I believe it's also a frustration of most React Native developers when they handle complex Audio Player.

I'm developing a guided meditation app. The app allows users to select a meditation sound to play, and also has a background sound embedded to each meditation (a background sound can be soft music, ambiance, ...). Another requirement for this app is supporting background mode (when user locks the screen, he/she can need to continue hearing both sounds of meditation and background sound played in background, and can also control the player via the controller on the lock screen of iOS )

The image below is to illustrate background mode

Because the meditation sound's duration is long (some sound can be over 1 hour length) and the requirement is background mode, I need a library which supports both streaming and background controller, that's why I chose react-native-track-player, and it works fine.

However, I also need to handle the background sound which is played concurrently with the main track of meditation, and react-native-track-player didn't support multitrack playing (you can see this issue: doublesymmetry/react-native-track-player#172 (comment)).

That's why I need to find another library to handle the background sound, at the beginning, I chose react-native-sound to handle it, however, react-native-sound didn't support streaming, and some background sounds are over 4 minutes and they take a lot of time for react-native-sound to load the whole sound before playing it.

Then I found react-native-audio-toolkit which supports streaming, I changed all of my logic of react-native-sound to react-native-audio-toolkit, and yes, it solves my slow loading speed issue, but I found another issue between react-native-audio-toolkit and react-native-track-player. Whenever the background sound handled by react-native-audio-tookit is played, it killed the background-mode functionality of react-native-track-player (the main sound handled by react-native-track-player is still playing, but the controller on the lock screen is disappeared)

The image below is to illustrate what it looks like when the controller on lock screen is disappeared

So my question: Is there any solution for this, I'm not sure whether it's because of the race condition between 2 libraries when they both support background mode playing. I'm super frustrated now and can't know how to solve this issue.

Thanks for your time of reading this long explanation.

[diegolego]

Why not just use react-native-audio-toolkit?

[nathantqn]

Hi @diegolego, but does react-native-audio-toolkit support the iOS background controller when the screen is locked as I screenshot above?

[diegolego]

Unfortunately it only supports background mode on Android.
https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-audio-toolkit/blob/master/docs/API.md#player-methods

I'm building an app with the same requirements. After checking out most of react-native audio libraries out there I didn't find one that supports both: background mode and merging two audios (on iOS and Android).

I was using react-native-cli but I figured that using expo.io with the expo-av package with some extra configuration might work. I'm gonna give that a try. I'll let you know if it works. Please let me know if you find a solution to this problem.

Cheers, and the best of luck with your project!

[diegolego]

By the way, I also found this option (haven't tried it yet though)
https://dev.to/chafikgharbi/a-trick-to-play-sound-on-screen-lock-or-background-in-react-native-and-expo-32ml

[bourgois]

Did you found a solution at the end?

[gavrichards]

I'm also having the exact same problem with the conflict between the these libraries and the disappearing lock screen controls. Would love to know if anyone found a solution.

[KrisLau]

@nenjamin2405 @gavrichards @bourgois Did anyone ever figure out a solution to this? I'm in the same predicament

[gavrichards]

Yes I switched to this fork, which has a fix for the issue.

[KrisLau]

@gavrichards Thanks so much, that fork actually builds for me while the master fork seems to be having issues! Now to figure out hwo to actually get the player to stop playing since that doesn't seem to work for me😆

[KrisLau]

Yes I switched to this fork, which has a fix for the issue.

@gavrichards In case you are looking for alternatives this thread might help: #270 (comment)