MediaPlayer in separate thread using Service or IntentService

Question

Hi I need a MediaPlayer instance to run in background so I started using a Service.

Everything works fine but I get ANR (application not responding) after a while, even if the UI works perfectly. Fair enough, I do know Services are still running on the main thread so the ANR makes sense.

So I tried using IntentService, which should spawn its own thread but I got nothing but headaches. IntentService seems ok when the workers are independent but that's not the case here because I need to call the startService(intent) method from the main app each time I need to change track and I don't want to end up with multiple MediaPlayer instances that play on top of each other..

I also saw a hint suggesting using a Thread inside a Service. how to I do that with Media Player? Should the DECLARATION be in that thread or just the "prepare/start, etc"? Fromwhat I saw that doesn't seem to work but I might just implemented it wrong

Any hints is very appreciated, possibly with a very simple example.

cheers

Answer 1

I strongly recommend you read the training documentation here: http://developer.android.com/guide/components/services.html

This was really helpful for me. And then the NPR app which streams audio is open source, so check out their service here: http://code.google.com/p/npr-android-app/source/browse/Npr/src/org/npr/android/news/PlaybackService.java

Reading both of those, I'd recommend using a Service and handling the threads yourself. I haven't worked with IntentService yet, but from your experience it seems like it's the wrong class to deal with music streaming. Hope that helps!