iPhone Application Development : Working with Rich Media - Accessing and Playing the iPod Library

Thankfully, developers can now directly access the iPod library and play any of the available music files. Best of all, this is amazingly simple to implement!

First, you’ll be using the MPMediaPickerController class to choose the music to play. There’s only a single method we’ll be calling from this class:

initWithMediaTypes: Initializes the media picker and filters the files that are available in the picker

We’ll configure its behavior with a handful of properties that can be set on the object:

prompt: A string that is displayed to the user when choosing songs

allowsPickingMultipleItems: Configures whether the user can choose one or more sound files

Like the AVAudioPlayer, we’re going to conform to the MPMediaPickerControllerDelegate protocol so that we can react when the user chooses a playlist. The method that we’ll be adding as part of the protocol is mediaPicker:didPickMediaItems:.

To play back the audio, we’ll take advantage of the MPMusicPlayerController class, which can use the playlist returned by the media picker. To control starting and pausing the playback, we’ll use four methods:

iPodMusicPlayer: This class method initializes the music player as an “iPod” music player, capable of accessing the iPod music library.

setQueueWithItemCollection: Sets the playback queue using a playlist (MPMediaItemCollection) object returned by the media picker.

play: Starts playing music.

pause: Pauses the music playback.

As you can see, when you get the hang of one of the media classes, the others start to seem very “familiar,” using similar initialization and playback control methods.

Implementing the Media Picker

To use a media picker, we’ll follow steps similar to the Image Picker: We’ll initialize and configure the behavior of the picker, and then add the picker as a modal view. When the user is done with the picker, we’ll add the playlist it returns to the music player and dismiss the picker view controller. If the user decides they don’t want to pick anything, we’ll simply dismiss the picker and move on.

For all of these steps to fall into place, we must already have an instance of the music player so that we can hand off the playlist. Recall that we declared an instance variable musicPlayer for the MediaPlaygroundViewController class. We’ll go ahead and initialize this variable in the MediaPlaygroundViewController.m viewDidLoad method. Add the following line to the method now (the location isn’t important):

musicPlayer=[MPMusicPlayerController iPodMusicPlayer];

With that small addition, our instance of the music player is ready, so we can proceed with coding the chooseiPod: method to display the media picker.

Update the MediaPlaygroundViewController implementation file with the new method in Listing 1.

Listing 1.

 1: -(IBAction)chooseiPod:(id)sender {
 2:     MPMediaPickerController *musicPicker;
 3:
 4:     [musicPlayer stop];
 5:     nowPlaying.text=@"No Song Playing";
 6:     [ipodPlayButton setTitle:@"Play iPod Music"
 7:                     forState:UIControlStateNormal];
 8:
 9:     musicPicker = [[MPMediaPickerController alloc]
10:                     initWithMediaTypes: MPMediaTypeMusic];
11:
12:     musicPicker.prompt = @"Choose Songs to Play" ;
13:     musicPicker.allowsPickingMultipleItems = YES;
14:     musicPicker.delegate = self;
15:
16:     [self presentModalViewController:musicPicker animated:YES];
17:     [musicPicker release];
18: }

First, line 2 declares the instance of MPMediaPickerController, musicPicker.

Next, lines 4–7 make sure that when the picker is called, the music player will stop playing its current song, the nowPlaying label in the interface is set to the default string “No Song Playing”, and the playback button is set to read “Play iPod Music”. These lines aren’t necessary, but they keep our interface from being out of sync with what is actually going on in the application.

Lines 9–10 allocate and initialize the media picker controller instance. It is initialized with a constant, MPMediaTypeMusic, that defines the type of files the user will be allowed to choose with the picker. You can provide any of five values listed here:

Line 12 sets a message that will be displayed at the top of the music picker.

In line 13, we set the allowsPickingMultipleItems property to a Boolean value (YES or NO) to configure whether the user can select one or more media files.

Line 14 sets the delegate music picker’s delegate. In other words, it tells the musicPicker object to look in the MediaPlaygroundViewController for the MPMediaPickerControllerDelegate protocol methods.

Line 16 uses the musicPicker view controller to display the iPod music library over the top of our application’s view.

Finally, line 17 releases the musicPicker.

Getting the Playlist

To get the playlist that is returned by media picker (an object called MPMediaItemCollection) and clean up after ourselves, we’ll add the mediaPicker:didPickMediaItems: protocol method from Listing 2 to our growing implementation.

Listing 2.

1: - (void)mediaPicker: (MPMediaPickerController *)mediaPicker
2:             didPickMediaItems:(MPMediaItemCollection *)mediaItemCollection {
3:     [musicPlayer setQueueWithItemCollection: mediaItemCollection];
4:     [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
5: }

					  

When the user is finished picking songs in the media picker, this method is called and passed the chosen items in a MPMediaItemCollection object, mediaItemCollection. In line 3, the music player instance, musicPlayer, is subsequently configured with the playlist via the setQueueWithItemCollection: method.

To clean things up, the modal view is dismissed in line 4.

Cleaning Up After the Media Picker

We’ve got one more situation to account for before we can wrap up the media picker: the possibility of a user exiting the media picker without choosing anything (touching Done without picking any tracks). To cover this event, we’ll add the delegate protocol method mediaPickerDidCancel. As with the image picker, we just need to dismiss the modal view controller. Add this method to the MediaPlaygroundViewController.m file:

- (void)mediaPickerDidCancel:(MPMediaPickerController *)mediaPicker {
    [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

Congratulations! You’re almost finished! The media picker feature is now implemented, so our only remaining task is to add the music player and make sure the corresponding song titles are displayed.

Implementing the Music Player

Because the musicPlayer object was created in the viewDidLoad method of the view controller (see the start of “Implementing the Media Picker”) and the music player’s playlist was set in mediaPicker:didPickMediaItems:, the only real work that the playiPod: method must handle is starting and pausing playback.

To spice things up a bit, we’ll try to be a bit clever—toggling the ipodPlayButton title between Play iPod Music (the default) and Pause iPod Music as needed. As a final touch, we’ll access a property of musicPlayer MPMusicPlayerController object called nowPlayingItem. This property is an object of type MPMediaItem, which contains a string property called MPMediaItemPropertyTitle set to the name of the currently playing media file, if available.

Putting this all together, we get the implementation of playiPod in Listing 3.

Listing 3.

 1: -(IBAction)playiPod:(id)sender {
 2:    if ([ipodPlayButton.titleLabel.text isEqualToString:@"Play iPod Music"]) {
 3:         [musicPlayer play];
 4:         [ipodPlayButton setTitle:@"Pause iPod Music"
 5:                         forState:UIControlStateNormal];
 6:         nowPlaying.text=[musicPlayer.nowPlayingItem
 7:                          valueForProperty:MPMediaItemPropertyTitle];
 8:     } else {
 9:         [musicPlayer pause];
10:         [ipodPlayButton setTitle:@"Play iPod Music"
11:                         forState:UIControlStateNormal];
12:         nowPlaying.text=@"No Song Playing";
13:     }
14: }

					  

Line 2 checks to see whether the ipodPlayButton title is set to Play iPod Music. If it is, line 3 starts playback, lines 4–5 reset the button to read “Pause iPod Music”, and lines 6–7 set the nowPlaying label to the title of the current audio track.

If the ipodPlayButton title is not Play iPod Music (line 8), the music is paused, the button title is reset to Play iPod Music, and the onscreen label is changed to display No Song Playing.

After completing the method implementation, save the MediaPlaygroundViewController.m file, and choose Build and Run to test the application. Pressing the Choose iPod Music button will open a media picker, as shown in Figure 1.

After you’ve created a playlist, press the Done button in the media picker, and then touch Play iPod Music to begin playing the sounds you’ve chosen. The title of the current song is displayed at the bottom of the interface.

There was quite a bit covered in this hour’s lesson, but consider the capabilities you’ve uncovered. Your projects can now tie into the same media capabilities that Apple uses in its iPhone apps—delivering rich multimedia to your users with a relatively minimal amount of coding.