Continuous playing of music when re-creating an Activity?

Question

I currently have an activity that plays music. When the activity is destroyed (i.e. user rotates the screen) I have the application store the music player's state and then play the music from the exact spot in the song once the activity is re-created.

My only issue is that there is a noticeable pause in the music when the activity is re-created. Any ideas on how to increase the activity's performance in regards to re-creating the app more efficiently. I know I can stop the activity to not re-create objects by using the configChanges tag in the android manifest but I would like to avoid that.

Is running the music in a separate service my only option?

Answer 1

Since the activity is destroyed it will pause no matter what you do. You should use a Service for this purpose. A service runs on a separate thread and is not effected by your activity. There's loads of tutorials and stackoverflow questions for services