Question

I am doing a streamed musicplayer for android.
I have tried with MediaPlayer

mp.setDataSource("http://www.myServerPage.com/songUrl.mp3"); 
mp.prepare(); 
mp.start(); 

and it works but not good.
The prepare state is very slow and often the application is freezing.

I have searched a lot on forums and tutorials and as far as I can see this is the common way of doing it.

Do anyone know is it is another way of opening up a stream to play music from a server or have any good advices, maybe in NDK or by some other inputstream?

Thanks for the help.
/micke

Answer 1

The Media Playback article is pretty clear about how to deal with remote media sources: call prepareAsync() and set a listener to get notified when the source is ready for playing.

The reason for this is exactly what you’re experiencing:

(…) the call to prepare() can take a long time to execute, because it
might involve fetching and decoding media data. So, as is the case
with any method that may take long to execute, you should never call
it from your application’s UI thread. Doing that will cause the UI
to hang until the method returns, which is a very bad user experience
and can cause an ANR (Application Not Responding) error.

I suggest you go over the mentioned article for some more information and pointers that may help you with further development.