Best way to handle audio interruptions?

[joshmohrer]

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Version of react-native-audio-recorder-player

3.6.7 and 3.6.10

I suddenly have started receiving pings from users indicating interruptions are deleting their recordings. This seems to be happening all at once so either something changed in my app (most likely) or perhaps in iOS?

I was wondering if anyone could share how they handle interruptions on the react native side. As it stands, interruptions seem to restart the recording and discard the audio up to that point. Could anyone share an example of how they handle this?

Version of React Native

Platforms you faced the error (IOS or Android or both?)

Expected behavior

Actual behavior

Steps to reproduce the behabior

[tinkon]

I am facing the same problem.

[joshmohrer]

For now ive moved to expo-av which has gotten better with Expo 51 and handled interruptions a little more elegantly.

[tinkon]

According to this commit, this issue should not have been there. I'm not sure what we are doing wrong.

hyochan/react-native-audio-recorder-player@a280080

[tinkon]

I messed with the code a bit. It calls to pause and resume based on the interrupt event beginning and end. The problem is, in some cases, you would just want to stop the player and save the file recorded so far. It seems that if you call stopRecorder while it is in the paused stage, you lose the file.

[zeRonaldo]

I was Having the Exact same issue,

• I downgraded the lib to before the fix 3.6.6
  -I had to make a module on my native side to handle system audio alert interruptions this rippled a trigger on my ReactNative side, which then paused the recording; BUT and there's a big one, the issue was on IOS;

so I had to put on higher stakes:

• the bug is a normal behavior on audio implementation dictionary that can be seen here it calls the prepareRecord function that zeroes our current audio;
• I altered the implementation to keep 2 separate stages, 1 for paused/interrupted audios inside an easily accessible folder; and one for stopped audios (or consolidated);
• this worked, but I still had audio pieces and not a complete audio, So I stitched them together after hitting stop, using native code;

[codecomeon]

I was Having the Exact same issue,

• I downgraded the lib to before the fix 3.6.6
  -I had to make a module on my native side to handle system audio alert interruptions this rippled a trigger on my ReactNative side, which then paused the recording; BUT and there's a big one, the issue was on IOS;

so I had to put on higher stakes:

• the bug is a normal behavior on audio implementation dictionary that can be seen here it calls the prepareRecord function that zeroes our current audio;
• I altered the implementation to keep 2 separate stages, 1 for paused/interrupted audios inside an easily accessible folder; and one for stopped audios (or consolidated);
• this worked, but I still had audio pieces and not a complete audio, So I stitched them together after hitting stop, using native code;

I did the same, i use ffmpeg-kit to merge all the pieces.

[Andrija00]

@zeRonaldo @codecomeon I have created custom module that can handle interruption when I am in background and I get call it will pause my recording but when I call my recorder to resume after interruption it won't unless I go to foreground and I pause it again and resume. For some reason seems like recorder is lost when you try to auto-resume it.
Can you share your code with me so I can implement auto-resuming as well?

[awallish]

@zeRonaldo @codecomeon @Andrija00 check this out: https://github.com/hyochan/react-native-audio-recorder-player/pull/648

[alexstaravoitau]

At least on recent versions of iOS the recording interruptions seem to be handled correctly (without merging files, etc) if you remove force-dispatching of pausing/resuming on the main thread (which was added in #608, but not sure it's necessary when pausing/resuming specifically).

Essentially, just remove the wrapping DispatchQueue.main.async blocks in pauseRecorder and resumeRecorder in RNAudioRecorderPlayer.swift:

Before:

    @objc(pauseRecorder:rejecter:)
    public func pauseRecorder(
        resolve: @escaping RCTPromiseResolveBlock,
        rejecter reject: @escaping RCTPromiseRejectBlock
    ) -> Void {
        recordTimer?.invalidate()
        recordTimer = nil;

        DispatchQueue.main.async {
            if (self.audioRecorder == nil) {
                return reject("RNAudioPlayerRecorder", "Recorder is not recording", nil)
            }

            self.audioRecorder.pause()
            resolve("Recorder paused!")
        }
    }

    @objc(resumeRecorder:rejecter:)
    public func resumeRecorder(
        resolve: @escaping RCTPromiseResolveBlock,
        rejecter reject: @escaping RCTPromiseRejectBlock
    ) -> Void {
        DispatchQueue.main.async {
            if (self.audioRecorder == nil) {
                return reject("RNAudioPlayerRecorder", "Recorder is nil", nil)
            }

            self.audioRecorder.record()

            if (self.recordTimer == nil) {
                self.startRecorderTimer()
            }
            resolve("Recorder paused!")
        }
    }

After:

    @objc(pauseRecorder:rejecter:)
    public func pauseRecorder(
        resolve: @escaping RCTPromiseResolveBlock,
        rejecter reject: @escaping RCTPromiseRejectBlock
    ) -> Void {
        recordTimer?.invalidate()
        recordTimer = nil;

        if (self.audioRecorder == nil) {
            return reject("RNAudioPlayerRecorder", "Recorder is not recording", nil)
        }

        self.audioRecorder.pause()
        resolve("Recorder paused!")
    }

    @objc(resumeRecorder:rejecter:)
    public func resumeRecorder(
        resolve: @escaping RCTPromiseResolveBlock,
        rejecter reject: @escaping RCTPromiseRejectBlock
    ) -> Void {
        if (self.audioRecorder == nil) {
            return reject("RNAudioPlayerRecorder", "Recorder is nil", nil)
        }

        self.audioRecorder.record()

        if (self.recordTimer == nil) {
            self.startRecorderTimer()
        }
        resolve("Recorder paused!")
    }

Perhaps I'm missing something, but in my (admittedly limited) testing recording works as intended, correctly pausing and resuming on interruptions, writing to a single file and maintaining correct recording duration.

[awallish]

@alexstaravoitau I'd love a simpler solution here like this, but it does not work for my testing. It ends the recording and corrupts the timer after answering a phone call, or playing a video with audio.

[alexstaravoitau]

@awallish That's very odd—I've tested this fix a fair bit, and it's been deployed in production for a while now without any issues. There are several other tangentially related issues, however, which could be the reason of what you're seeing:

1. Don't rely on the recording duration reported by the package, because it's being picked up from the wrong source—you will see reported duration jumping wildly if you connect/disconnect headphones while recording, for example.
2. When recording is finished, you're supposed to deactivate the session (i.e. try self.audioSession.setActive(false, options: .notifyOthersOnDeactivation)), which this package doesn't do. Not sure if this will have an impact in your case, but it did break a few things in mine.
3. Keep in mind that any attempts to resume recording while the app is in background will fail (due to OS restrictions). I'm not 100% sure if the package will handle this—e.g. you might need to check the result of self.audioRecorder.record() in resumeRecorder() and call the rejecter closure if it fails to resume.

[vishalnaikawadi]

This thread is probably too old, but I came across same situation and I handled it this way: https://github.com/hyochan/react-native-audio-recorder-player/issues/652#issuecomment-2882985472

[mitar-drazic]

@Andrija00 Помаже Бог!

[hyochan]

Hi — closing this as 🗑 stale-legacy. This issue references the pre-Nitro react-native-audio-recorder-player API, which has since been rewritten on top of react-native-nitro-modules and republished as react-native-nitro-sound. The internals, method names, and error surfaces are different.

If this still reproduces on the current react-native-nitro-sound, please open a fresh issue with:

• react-native-nitro-sound version
• React Native version
• Platform (iOS/Android) + OS version
• A minimal reproduction

We'll triage it promptly. Thanks for your patience. 🙏

🤖 This repo is now AI-native maintained — see #787.