A demo of background music in Mango!

July 4, 2011 | By andrewbares

One of the great features coming with Mango is the background agent for playing music. This means you could be listening to Pandora while writing an email, or listening to a podcast app while surfing the web!

Once Mango is released to the public, developers of music applications have to update their apps to include the background music code, but it isn’t too tough to implement thanks to Microsoft’s tutorials. This also opens up the possibility of someone creating a SkyDrive or Dropbox music streaming application which could practically replace any need to store music on your phone! But don’t get too impatient, it’ll still be a few months till Mango is released. Hopefully all of that time will give developers the chance to have their apps updated before Mango is even released.

Other great new developer tools include direct camera access, background agents, flipping homescreen tiles, augmented reality support, and more. If you’re a developer, check out all 22 new code samples here.

About Andrew Bares

As an avid gamer, I see the Windows Phone as a solid platform for mobile gaming. I will review almost every WP7 game and give you an idea if it is worth your money or not! In addition to gaming, I have been using Windows Mobile since 2005, and understand just about everything there is to know about the Windows Phone platform. Xbox Gamertag: DirtSurfer07 (add me!)

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Tagged Developer, mango

deng mam

Are there apps coming to the Marketplace (or updates) that would work just as usual with NoDo, but give some extra funtionalities for mangousers? Like better LiveTilemanagement or instanst resuming when selecting an app in the multitaskingmenu…

Dudemanshoehead

all apps in the marketplace right now has to target the 7.0 sdk, which does not support any of the new mango features. the app submission process will be updated to accommodate new apps that requires mango api as the release date draw nearer. short answer: no.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1300735256 Andrew Bares

I’m not sure. It would be nice if developers started doing that/Microsoft approved apps like that. There’s no reason to block 7.1 code really.
http://fxfp.com/ Alex F.

That would have to be separate builds which can be quite messy.
Considering that right now 7.5 apps cannot be uploaded to Marketplace at all, and that 7.5 will be a free update for everyone – I don’t think it’s worth the trouble to maintain such duality.
Monkey D Black

all NoDo users will be udpated to Mango so there would be no need for a developer to make an app for mango and another version of that same app for NoDo or to cripple features to work along with NoDo. when Mango comes out NoDo will be faced out just like the pre NoDo version was faced out.
Anonymous

Either the Marketplace will send you the proper version for mango or nodo, or nodo will just ignore the mango specific lines of code. Either way, the answer to your question will have to be yes. Think about it, we’ll have 2-3 months of waiting for carriers to approve the mango rollout, while Nokia and others will have Mango devices already on the market. There will have to be a duality there.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=688975606 Kris Rushton

All i know is, at about 1:00 i saw a Facebook tile with notifications on it…………That’ll do me nicely

Adro

thats already available with the recent FB app upgrade.

http://www.facebook.com/nizzon Johan Nilsson

But it has NEVER worked on my Omnia7, not toasts and not Tile Notifications. Its as broken as it can be.

Adro

Works for me on my HTC Trophy. They did say on their facebook page its not perfect, so maybe a future update will fix it.
Adro

Works for me on my HTC Trophy. They did say on their facebook page its not perfect, so maybe a future update will fix it.

Anonymous

As adro said, its already there BUT while trying the mango stuff, i lost need for the facebook app because you get notificationss direct to your ME tile and its soo much better

Anonymous

I already mentioned this in another thread and im saying it again (not copy pasting).
So yes, as you showed us, apps will be able to play music in the background and that is really great. dont get me wrong.

But, ok… in my daily use of.. lets say the PODCAST! App, there are times when i AM in an area with small reception and this app will not work quite understandably whereas if i went to lets say bol.cnet.com where podcasts are archived(?) it would load the podcast fine. im guessing this is due to the browser being native or something, im no developer and i dont know.
Now, You cannot, run audio RUNNING in the browser, in the background. Now this really sucks.

Joe Belfiore, showed off something that looked like audio in the browser in the background (i think at MWC11) but this wasnt really right. What he showed off, was a specially made HTML5 Playlist. and this playlist can be accessed on Microsofts testdrive site and works as joe showed BUT Back to my point.
No one is gonna make special HTML5 playlists and this is unfortunate.
sorry i think i kinda lost track of what i was saying and may be muddled
http://twitter.com/noelitaux noël villagrana

i am currently using mango beta and other than zune no other streaming music runs in the background, but we just have to be patient to get this feature back
http://twitter.com/noelitaux noël villagrana

i am currently using mango beta and other than zune no other streaming music runs in the background, but we just have to be patient to get this feature back
http://twitter.com/lebeau32 lebeau32

Can’t you already play music in the background? I stream with my Zune pass while doing other things. Maybe you can’t do it now with other apps? I’ve never used anything besides the Zune pass so didn’t know it wasn’t currently available to all users?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1300735256 Andrew Bares

Correct, only Zune can play in the background. Slacker Radio and any other app can’t as of now. Mango makes it all possible!

Anonymous

Audible? I actually stopped my audible subscription until it’s available on my WP7.
Anonymous

Why does everyone love pandora so much? it sucks, I stopped using it years ago.
Anonymous

Why does everyone love pandora so much? it sucks, I stopped using it years ago.