How do I stop the currently playing ringtone?

Question

I'm writing an app that sometime fires reminders that are supposed to play ringtones. I can start the ringtone OK, but can't stop it. I have a dismiss method in my fragment that should stop the currently playing ringtone and close the activity, but it doesn't work right. Here's what it does:

    RingtoneManager ringMan = new RingtoneManager(getActivity());
    ringMan.stopPreviousRingtone();
    getActivity().finish();

The method does get executed and the activity closes, but the ringtone just keeps on playing. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Reason why stopPreviousRingtone() is not stopping the ringtone

I found that it is only possible to stop a ringtone using RingtoneManager.stopPreviousRingtone() only if the Ringtone was created by the same RingtoneManager instance. An easy way to confirm this is to create an activity with a RingtoneManager and three buttons:

1. Clicking the first button will use the RingtoneManager to start a ringtone.
2. Clicking the second button will call stopPreviousRingtone() on the RingtoneManager.
3. Clicking the third button will call stopPreviousRingtone() on the completely different RingtoneManager instance.

After doing this, you should find that the ringtone will only stop if you click the second button.

Stopping a Ringtone if you have access to the original Ringtone instance

If you have access to the original Ringtone instance, you can just call the stop() method:

Ringtone ringtone = RingtoneManager.getRingtone(getActivity());
ringtone.play();
...
ringtone.stop();

Stopping Ringtones when keeping a reference to the original Ringtone is not possible

What you could try is to create a service which will load and play the ringtone when it was started and will stop the ringtone when it was destroyed. Here is an example:

public class RingtonePlayingService extends Service
{
    private Ringtone ringtone;

    @Override
    public IBinder onBind(Intent intent)
    {
        return null;
    }

    @Override
    public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId)
    {
        Uri ringtoneUri = Uri.parse(intent.getExtras().getString("ringtone-uri"));

        this.ringtone = RingtoneManager.getRingtone(this, ringtoneUri);
        ringtone.play();

        return START_NOT_STICKY;
    }

    @Override
    public void onDestroy()
    {
        ringtone.stop();
    }
}

Then, you can start the ringtone in the background just by starting the service:

Intent startIntent = new Intent(context, RingtonePlayingService.class);
startIntent.putExtra("ringtone-uri", ringtoneUri);
context.startService(startIntent);

And, to stop the ringtone, just stop the service:

Intent stopIntent = new Intent(context, RingtonePlayingService.class);
context.stopService(stopIntent);