Audio Fades or Stops While Running Chrome Windows 8.1 Metro App In Background?

Audio Fades or Stops While Running Chrome Windows 8 Metro App In Background? That won’t be fixed according to Google. Read on, to find out why.

Audio Fades or Stops While Running Windows 8 Metro App In Background?

Today, while Soundcloud was playing some music for me on Chrome, I switched from the Chrome Metro app to another one, while leaving Chrome in the background. Music stopped as soon as I switched to the other app. It resumed when I opened Chrome again.

I found many users reporting the same issue on Chrome support forum. So, it was not my computer or my set up.

Is It Same for All Metro Apps on Windows 8?

No. I found this on Microsoft’s website.

In Windows 8, we made it really easy for you to develop an app that plays audio in a simple and power efficient manner. Windows 8 provides system level controls that are designed to improve the user experience within the MediaControl class, using stream categorization, and media transport controls. In this section, we look at how to make your app play audio in the background. We don’t go into details about actually playing audio or the Media Control classes. For more info about the audio technologies, see the Audio playback in a Metro style app white paper.

There are three important requirements that the app must meet to play audio in the background:

• A background audio declaration must be in the app manifest.
• You must set the stream category (msAudioCategory) to either Communications or BackgroundCapableMedia.
• Your app must register for media transport controls.

The article has detailed instructions on how to get this working.

 So, Why Chrome?

I got my answer from this Chrome bug report. ts not just Chrome. IE 10 also will do the same thing if you play something with audio and change to another app, leaving it run in the background.

We were told my Microsoft that it was unsupported behavior for Metro-style browsers to continue audio playback in the background., a Chromium developer says.

The Music app on Windows 8 can play music in background, so why not other apps like browsers?

The Music app is a pure Metro app, whereas Chrome and IE are desktop apps under the hood. We’d love to be able to emulate this functionality, but Microsoft’s guidance is that we can’t.

Unfortunately, the OS is in control here. There’s no decision Chrome can make to continue playing music in the background; when Chrome is running as a Windows 8 app, and it goes offscreen, the operating system simply suspends us and we cannot continue executing any processes. It’s out of our control.

So, there you have it. Chrome will not be able to give you music in the background if you are running it as a metro app. Here is how you can switch between metro mode and desktop mode.

Is There Any Workaround?

So desktop mode is what you will have to use until someone finds a workaround. An alternative method you can follow for now is running Chrome Metro App in Snap In mode. That is, running Chrome and your second or third app side by side. To do this, you need to click and drag Chrome from top of the window and snap it to left or right and then open second app. Like this:

Stay tuned to this blog, I will update when a workaround is available for sure!