Question

I’m using a book called Android Wireless Application Development 2nd edition 2009 (L.Darcey & S.Conder, published by Addison Wesley) as my literature for a course I’m currently doing in Android app development. In the third chapter of this book you use the MediaPlayer class to initiate a media player object to stream mp3 files to your app using to this method below.

public void playMusicFromWeb() {
    try {
        Uri file = Uri.parse("http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/6music/adamandjoe/adamandjoe_20111231-1430a.mp3");
        mp = MediaPlayer.create(this, file);
        mp.start();
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e(DEBUG_TAG, "Player failed", e);
    }
}

Happy days, this all works just fine in API 8 (which is what the book uses). However trying to use this method in a higher API, especially 15 which is (on writing) the latest API available I get a NullPointerException thrown. Debugging makes me none the wiser as the file variable seems to hold the string value fine, but it won’t translate into a functional mp3 stream. I have tried various different approaches using prepare(); prepareAsync(); setDataSource(); reset(); etc., however nothing seems to work. You’d think that my teachers would be able to help me out, but they apparently don’t know what to do either.
I now assume that this way of streaming must be obsolete in higher API’s than 8. I would be very grateful if someone could shine a light on how to stream an mp3 file in API 15.

Answer 1

It was as simple as adding this line:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

to the manifest file!