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I use my phone to play music at work. When I wander away from my desk, I often leave my headphones plugged in. If someone calls my phone when the headphones are plugged in, the phone rings, but only through the headphones and I end up missing the call. What I would like is to be able to set different audio to play through different outputs: my audio player through my headphones and my ringtone through my speaker. I've looked through the sound settings and haven't found much that seems incredibly useful.

Are there any apps that currently support doing this? Does the android api even support multiple audio output targets?

Phone info:

  • HTC Evo 4G (Rooted)
  • FreshEvo 3.5.1 (based on android 2.2)
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    I know CyanogenMod gives you the option to do this, but I imagine that it's implemented at the OS level rather than at the application level...
    – eldarerathis
    Apr 14, 2011 at 12:59
  • I use a stereo A2DP Bluetooth device connected to my phone and when the phone rings, the first second of notes actually sound on the phone and then it continues over the bluetooth :-) This is orthogonal from your point but I found it interesting that I would like to actually turn that off!
    – nik
    Apr 18, 2011 at 17:56
  • I am in the same situation: any solutions yet?
    – Palantir
    May 26, 2011 at 13:05
  • @Palantir CyanogenMod seems to be the best solution at the moment. I haven't switched over since I've been listening to music on my phone less and less, but I would still like to find a more graceful solution than switching ROMs
    – Dave McClelland
    May 26, 2011 at 13:19
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    I'm not sure if this will help you, but a habit that I have developed that helps with this issue is that I always pause the music by pulling the headphones. I started doing this on my iPod back in the days out of convenience, and I kept on doing it. Turns out, for smartphones it actually helps you avoid situations like this (and on the iPod, it helped you avoid battery drain from the iPod playing music all night).
    – pzkpfw
    May 16, 2013 at 7:16

3 Answers 3

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I was going to suggest CyanogenMod also, if that doesn't work or isn't something you are interested in, you should try Tasker

http://tasker.dinglisch.net/

https://market.android.com/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm

It pretty much can do just about anything you can think of without quite as much work as writing an app yourself.

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    So, how exactly does one do this in Cyanogen?
    – RomanSt
    May 28, 2014 at 16:58
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I had a similar issue at work. What i ended up doing was turning the "Vibrate" setting on in Settings/Sounds. My phone was bugging everyone else in the office before (which is why i started using headphones) but with that setting, the phone vibrates on receiving a call as well as ringing in the headphones. I didn't have to disturb anyone, and i still got calls when i forgot about my headphones!

Don't know if this would be practical for you, but it worked nicely for me, so i thought i'd share!

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CM had indeed a persist.sys.ring-speaker property to do exactly this. I don't believe it was ever available outside of the android 2.3 tree though (and as of 2020, developers don't even seem to realize there is a need for "choice").

Then, while I think a "native routing selection setting" (like some vendors already independently offer) is the best solution, workarounds should still be doable. A phone dialer automatically switching/mirroring audio for you would be my second best idea, but unfortunately I'm not aware of any having such feature.

For this reason, the only other possible option is some kind of notification listener, re-routing the sound, or playing a new separate tone of its own, when a call approaches. In this thread "Shouter" was recommended, and I have to say it works quite neatly (a tasker recipe can also be found there, for more advanced users).

Take note, not all devices may like playing more than a single audio stream at once.

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