I'm writing a music player for iOS that needs to have all the features of the built-in Music app. My app needs to continue running in the background so I have to use the AVPlayer class.
Are there any open source implementations out there that I can use instead of writing the whole thing myself?
Just found this. It works great:
https://github.com/gangverk/GVMusicPlayerController
If you want to play tracks from your iTunes music library, and don't want to use the MPMusicPlayerController class, your best bet is to use AVPlayer or AVQueuePlayer (subclass of AVPlayer). You must establish the appropriate audio session and register to receive remote control events for the app to continue playing music in the background.
There are downsides to this method; you won't be able to play DRM-protected tracks and audiobooks purchased from the iTunes store. There's no way to instantiate an iTunes Match download with the AVPlayer class. Furthermore, you'll have a bit of work on your hands if you want to add gapless playback and equaliser settings (The closest you'll get to gapless playback is with the AVQueuePlayer subclass, though in theory, you could overlap AVPlayers with an NSTimer).
You'll also need to change 'Required Background Modes' in your Info.plist to 'App plays audio'
As for the rest of your app, I suggest you read up on UITabBarControllers and UITableViewControllers along with MPMediaQuerys.
See this solution for the audio part.
Related
I am building a iOS app with Ionic and Capacitor. I use AVFoundation inside a Capacitor plugin which provides a public method to play an audio file accessible at a remote URL. The basics work, the audio file is successfully played. Now I want to correctly handle interruptions and background audio. By background audio I mean start playing an audio file while the app is in the background and not continue playing it in the background when it was started in foreground before. To summarize, the app should behave the following way:
If another app (e.g. Spotify) is playing audio and my app wants to play audio, the other app should be interrupted and my app's audio should start playing without mixing.
If my app's audio is finished playing, the other app's audio should resume.
My app must be able to start playing audio without mixing when it is in the background.
I want to show a play/pause button and the audio title on the lockscreen and in the notification center.
I added the background mode audio capability. I use AVPlayer, AVAudioSession, MPNowPlayingInfoCenter and MPRemoteCommandCenter, followed best practices, especially regarding activation and deactivation of an audio session and interruption handling. I followed this question and this question. I tried several solutions, but never managed to achieve all of the above goals. What I found out so far is the following:
Goal 1. above is easy to achieve. Simply activate an audio session without mixing and start playing the audio.
After the audio of my app is finished, I deactivate the audio session. Unfortunately, I can only achieve goal 2. above if I don't use remote commands nor notification info. This means, my app then has no audio control UI on the lockscreen nor in the notification center. Somehow the configurations of MPNowPlayingInfoCenter and MPRemoteCommandCenter seem to affect the interruption behavior. As far as I could see, Apple documentation doesn't say anything about this.
I only manage to start playing audio in the background when setting the option .mixWithOthers. Apple documentation doesn't say anything about this, either.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Rony
I'm having an issue with playing sequences of different kinds of items in a background.
In an app I'm working on we've introduced playlists which contain both content provided by the app and Apple Music content.
For that use AVPlayer and MPMusicPlayerController respectively. We observe one player or the other (depending what content is now playing) and if the other kind of content comes next, we release the old player (if we can - MPMusicPlayerController is a singleton, so best we can do is stop it) and load item to another player.
The problem starts when the app leaves foreground. Once MPMusicPlayerController takes over it doesn't want to give up control, so if any AVPlayer content comes after MPMusicPlayerController content, the music stops.
One workaround that I've tried is playing with .mixWithOthers options when I set the category on AVAudioSession, however this creates new category of problems - I'm loosing lockscreen controls, therefore I'm also loosing airplay. One dirty trick that I've tried was setting .mixWithOthers 3 seconds before MPMediaItem ends, and then disabling it back once AVPlayer starts. Beside the fact that there're probably many different things that can go wrong here, MPMediaPlayerController still doesn't want to give me back the control over lockscreen controls.
Is there any way this could ever work on iOS 13?
Phonegap media play method has a magic option playAudioWhenScreenIsLocked = false that does good job:
Prevents app music from playing when app is in background;
Makes app music obey the hardware "mute" button: without this option your app will ignore if user device is muted and play sound anyway.
But there is third hidden magic in this option. It stops current playing song from native Music app. Most of all it's annoying when I want to play short single sound.
Actually I would like to implement this scenario:
Music: Check if system music is playing on the app start. If it is not, play my app music, otherwise let user enjoy his own media.
Sound FX: Just play my little sound once and don't spoil anything.
And never play anything in background and when device is muted! Even if system Music app can let itself do so.
Has anyone managed to do something similar?
Thank you.
Ended up using https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-plugin-nativeaudio (https://build.phonegap.com/plugins/2291)
Be aware: simple sound effects are not working in Simulator.
I am creating a radio streaming app with play, pause and volume slider.
I have implemented volume slider using MPVolumeView but unfortunately it is not working.
Can any one please let me know the correct code so that the volume slider will work in my app. I have used MPMoviePlayerController, AVPlayer, AVAudioPlayer.
Sounds as if you missed an important part of Apple's documentation;
Working with Movies and iPod Music
I am suspecting that you are using both, AVAudioPlayer and MPMoviePlayerController together and that you have setup some audio session attributes to get that working properly. Now when doing so, you may want to tell MPMoviePlayerController to use that session / or not.
Using the Media Player Framework Exclusively
If your application is using a movie player only, or a music player
only—and you are not playing your own sounds—then you should not
configure an audio session.
If you are using a movie player exclusively, you must tell it to use
its own audio session, as follows:
myMoviePlayer.useApplicationAudioSession = NO
If you are using a movie
player and a music player, then you probably want to configure how the
two interact; for this, you must configure an audio session, even
though you are not playing application audio per se. Use the guidance
in Table 6-1.
Within my application, I am playing downloaded audio using an AVAudioPlayer, while simultaneously playing audio from the user's iPod music library with an MPMusicPlayerController.
I need to be able to adjust the Volume of the AVAudioPlayer instance so that it's louder
than the audio coming from the MPMusicPlayerController.
The problem is, when I adjust the Volume property of the AVAudioPlayer, it also
adjusts the volume of the MPMusicPlayerController.
Is there any solution which would allow me to independently control the volume of
these two players?
If not, is there another technique I should use to do this? Any help is appreciated.
Take a look at the documentation for AVAudioSession. For example, in the AVAudioSession Programming Guide, says the following:
"Finally, you can enhance a category to automatically lower the volume of other audio when your audio is playing. This could be used, for example, in an exercise application. Say the user is exercising along to their iPod when your application wants to overlay a verbal message—for instance, “You’ve been rowing for 10 minutes.” To ensure that the message from your application is intelligible, apply the kAudioSessionProperty_OtherMixableAudioShouldDuck property to your audio session. When ducking takes place, all other audio on the device—apart from phone audio—lowers in volume."
I think it might solve your problem. The documentation on initializing an AVAudioSession and setting its categories and properties is pretty clear and easy to follow; you should have no trouble.