Question

I am trying to pick a song using an Activity which will give meta-information about the songs. I want to do this instead of a simple file browser . I have the following code but it unfortunately also plays the song once clicked. I simply want the user to be able to select a song from their MediaStore and act upon it later without playing.

public class Main extends Activity {
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
        Intent intent = new Intent();
        intent.setAction(android.content.Intent.ACTION_PICK);
        intent.setData(MediaStore.Audio.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI);
        startActivity(intent);
    }
}

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, the ‘picker’ you’re seeing is a ‘preview’ type of design (looking at it on my phone).

It’s a bit like ‘picking’ a ringtone, for example…

You see a list and can select each one in turn to get a ‘preview’. When you decide on the ringtone you want, you click OK and that returns the selection. Clicking Cancel simply leaves things as they were (existing ringtone selection is kept).

I can’t see any way of overriding this behaviour of the picker and haven’t found any alternative way (Intent parameters, for example) to achieve what you want to do.

In other words, as I understand it, you simply want the user to silently pick a piece of music and it to return to your Activity but the (preview) picker doesn’t work that way.

You can find out what the user previewed/selected when they click OK in the picker however, if you use…

startActivityForResult(intent, 1234);

Note, 1234 is just an arbitrary code.

If you check the Intent returned to onActivityResult() it will have the content Uri of the piece of music the user selected before they pressed OK.