When you say "PHONE" what are you looking at doing?
For music, I find it fastest to map the player to a button, that way if you 'lose' the player, you can hit the button and it should pop-up again. Doesn't help the stoping issue I guess, but it is a fast way of getting it back on the screen!
I find AEButton Plus
http://ae.inc.ru/aebplus.php works great for assigning multiple items to buttons (and there is a free version)