Question

I was just testing mediaplayer in android, i started a stream in the onCreate method and I have a button that calls the finish() method. After clicking the button I can still hear the stream playing even though the activity is close, I am wondering if this is a leak of sorts and i will have to stop the player first before calling the finish() method, or if finish() method actually does not full kill the app to free up resources. Thank you for reading

            public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
            setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
            Button add_function,exit_btn;   
            add_function = (Button) findViewById(R.id.view_chat);
            exit_btn = (Button) findViewById(R.id.exit_btn);


            MediaPlayer mp = new MediaPlayer();
            String URL_OF_FILE = "http://stream.radiosai.net:8002/";
    try {
        mp.setDataSource(URL_OF_FILE);
         mp.prepare();
    } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (SecurityException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (IllegalStateException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

            mp.start();



        exit_btn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {

            public void onClick(View v) {
                // TODO Auto-generated method stub
                finish();
            }
        });
             }// EOF ONCREATE

Answer 1

Calling finish() does not kill the application, it just destroys the current Activity that you’re finishing. Although I would think finishing the Activity would stop the MediaPlayer, what you should probably do in this case is override onDestroy(), and release your MediaPlayer object there. For instance:

@Override
public void onDestroy() {
    if(mediaPlayer != null) mediaPlayer.release();
    super.onDestroy();
}