Jailbreak Central – Backgrounder
Scenario: You are listening to streaming music with an app like Pandora when you get a text message. You click reply and go to the Messaging App. But what happened to the music?
The problem lies in how the iPhone OS handles processes (applications). In the default behavior, pressing the Home button closes an application and exits the process. Hence, Pandora can’t play music while you switch applications. There are only a few exemptions to this rule. The iPod app, for example, can continue to play music in the background while you use other apps.
While Apple stubbornly refuses to allow 3rd party applications to run on the background, developer gaizin blesses us with a solution.
His app Backgrounder allows you to send an application to the background without quitting the process. Background Pandora and stream music while you browse the web, get directions in Maps, send texts, anything. Background your favorite twitter app and get live updates. Better yet, background Skype so your friends can ring you for free at any time!
My favorite use for Backgrounder is to send Fstream, my favorite free audio streaming client, to the background so that i can listen while following directions from Maps in my car.
That’s great, but how will this effect my battery life?
Another technique that I’ve discovered and used ever since is to play Live Internet Radio streams in Safari. My iPhone is not jailbroken and yet I can stream Internet Radio in the background using Safari. When you click on a stream link (mp3 only), it will play in quicktime on your iphone and you can go navigate away from Safari and still keep listening to the stream.
One drawback I have found is that it blocks browsing web pages because you will have to end Quicktime’s session. However, I got around this by getting a free browser app from the App Store and use that when I need to visit a website while listening to Internet Radio.