One of the frustrations I’ve found with iPhone gaming is that you have to listen to the games music instead of what is currently playing in the iPod app. I’m sure you probably had a similar experience, you purchase your first game, turn on some music, open the game and your music fades out and pauses.
Well luckily there is a work around, it doesn’t work for all games but it does work with some of them.
- Make sure you have the iPod controls turned on when you double tap the home button.
- Start the music you’d like to listen to (or podcast, which is what I usually do).
- Open the game you would like to play.
- In the games settings turn off all sounds and set the volume sliders to as low as possible.
- Hit the lock button on the top of your iPhone.
- Double tap the home screen button for the iPod controls and hit play.
- Hit the lock button on the top once to turn the screen off and a second time to turn the screen back on.
- Slide to unlock and your game should show up on screen.
Now if this work around is usable on the game your playing the music should continue if not it will fade out, pause, and your out of luck.
I’ve found that it doesn’t work with Scrabble or Sudoku but does work with De Blob and Apple’s Texas Hold’em.
It doesn’t really make amy sense why the game makes the audio from the iPod app turn off unless the OS needs more memory for the game and tells the iPod app to quit. But, you would think there would be a way for developers to do some sort of check like if iPod music is playing mute gameplay audio, or something like that.
If you find another game that it does or doesn’t work with leave a comment and let us all know.
Update – GTS World racing actually has exactly what I want, it has the ability to disable game audio so that you can listen to your own audio from iPod.app. It’s amazing to me that their aren’t any more iPhone games that allow you to do this. I just wish it was as easy as writing a line of code that checks to see if iPod.app is playing, if so disable game audio.
I agree, this is extremely frustrating. Ideally you want to be able to turn off game music and play the sound effects over whatever iPod track you are listening to. Hopefully Apple will provide this functionality in a future update.
does not work with Tetris which means that I spent $10 on something I just won’t play very much. Seems so silly.
this is the work around i’ve been trying to figure out forever! a game like crash bandicoot always disables your ipod music when starting up, but this worked! you have to do it just right, start the game, let it get to the playing menu (after it would normally disable your music), then hit the lock button, double-click to start ipod music), then turn off an on…
we should get this out to like every iphone gaming site possible, i’ve been looking for this answer forever and finally found this site… awesome.
Ugh, I tried, but that didn’t work on my app (Pretty Pet Salon Seasons). Moreover, when I went back into the app after unlocking my iphone, the volume (which had been at 0) auto-turned itself back to default, and the music (which had been set to off) started up again. The sound effects for the game remained silent, and when I went back into the app’s settings, the music showed as being turned off, but was still playing anyway. They clearly didn’t program it very well.
This worked for me! Thanks. Now I can listen to podcasts while playing Worms 4.