I was wondering if there is a way the app could know if a user started to play music from the Music app or any other source (Spotify etc.). I am trying to do a specific function every time a user plays a song even if my app is not active. Is this even possible? Can I also retrieve the song information?
With AVKit you can make use:
AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().isOtherAudioPlaying
A Boolean value indicating whether another app is currently playing
audio.
Note that this will not work when your app is inactive. You can´t do that and Apple will reject your app. You can only make this check if your app is active.
Related
I have not started coding my app but I have an idea and want to see if this part of it is possible. Would it be ok if, given a track ID, I played the song (through MediaPlayer) in the app, even if the user had not bought the song and do not have it in their library?
If not, what would be the best way to play music that anyone (or most people, at least) can listen to as they use my app?
You can play music that:
is in the user's library
or, is embedded in your app
or, is available online where your app can readily access it (assuming reachability etc.)
Say there are two apps on my iPhone. One is a music player developed by others, the other is developed by me. After my app interrupts the music player's audio session, I want to re-active its audio session without de-activating my app's audio session.
Two questions:
1. Is it workable?
If not, are there any other ways to finish the task?[I don't want to give up my audio session because my app should record all the time.]
In a word, is there other way to reactive interrupted audio session except running "setActive:NO" in current session?
Hope someone can help me. Thx
I'm making an app that uses gestures to change the current background music e.g Pause, Skip, etc. Currently I can do this fine for music that is playing through the native MPMusicPlayerController class.
However I am unable to control the music when it is coming from Spotify (or other music playing apps for that matter). I believe this is to do with Apple's sandboxing policy between apps.
I'm not too hopeful, but does anyone know a way to trigger a universal music control notification? Something similar to what must happen on the iOS lockscreen when background music is playing? All my research tells me this almost definitely done through a private API, but am unable to get confirmation.
Alternatively, is there any Spotify specific way to achieve this?
Unfortunately the answer is No.
You can't get any information/Notifications about other apps, even regarding what's now playing.
As you wondered, it's all regarding the Sandboxing policy of Apple.
I want to know -- what happens to a user's music when an AVPlayer starts to play? Does nothing happen, does it stop, or does the action cancel itself? If so, how would I check and see if the user is playing music?
Apple's Documentation for this confused me.
Alright, looking up the info for this, it seems that AVAudioPlayer objects only interrupts the user's audio if the app's AVAudioSession's category is set to Solo Ambient, the default.
I saw this answer: App with AVPlayer plays mp4 interrupt iPod music after launched
I also saw this table in the Apple Developer documentation that explains whether or not different categories interrupt the user's music, with examples of different scenarios, including one for a game: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Sound.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH44-SW1
In order to not interrupt the user's music, I need to set this to Ambient.
I'm designing a music app that plays music from the user's iPhone music library and I'm having problems figuring out which audio player is the right one to use for it (AVAudioPlayer, AVPlayer, or MPMusicPlayer).
My app needs to do the following:
Play music from the iPhone music library
Control app music volume separately from device/system volume
Continue to play app music when app moves to background
Catch events when song changes to next song or finishes
From my research it seems like each of the three audio players mentioned above do SOME of the tasks required for my app, but none of them do ALL of them. AVPlayer seems to get the closest, except its volume is dependent on the device/system volume.
Does anyone have any recommendations or workarounds to accomplish this? I've been wracking my brain over this for quite some time so any help at all would be appreciated.
EDIT
The MPMusicPlayerController class does not actually support playing background audio when getting an instance of it via + applicationMusicPlayer. The best option, then, is to simply use MPMusicPlayer to query the iPod music library. Once a song is selected by the user, the resulting MPMediaItem can be queried for it's asset URL and fed into AVPlayer's +playerWithURL, giving you full control of playback parameters.
--
I would recommend MPMusicPlayerController.
MPMusicPlayerControllerhandles the low-level details of playing audio files in the iTunes library.
You can use the class method -applicationMusicPlayer to get a local copy of the iPod singleton; from there, you can control its volume by setting its volume property for just your application.
I would assume MPMusicPlayerController has background audio support already built in. If it doesn't, you can change your app's audio session context to make it work (see Playing background audio in http://www.sagorin.org/2011/11/29/ios-playing-audio-in-background-audio/)
You can setup any object you choose to be a KVO observer of your application-specific MPMusicPlayerController object. This way, you can be notified whenever the nowPlayingItem property is changed.
Hopefully this high-level description suffices. Let me know if you need any further clarification.