Global Audio Player for tabbed App

Question

after days of research I came to the conclusion that there is no other way than to ask here directly.

I have an tabbed application with several UITableViewControllers inside. When I click on a cell in one of these TableViewControllers there should be played some audio streams. This is working so far using MPMoviePlayerViewController. But when I click on "Done" in the player, the audio stops to play.

What I need is to be able to start the audio track, and when I click "done" it should not stop. Also, there should be a way to get back to the player.

What I was thinking is to make something like a "global view" with an integrated player and all other views in the app should use this global view to play the selected audio.

So, I created an UIView which has a method playAudio that starts playing in a MPMoviePlayerViewController. But what is the way to go to this view from another. Right now I am just calling this method directly and before that I added

[self.navigationController pushViewController:mediaPlayer animated:YES];

but I think I am on the wrong way here. What I want to achieve is to play audio in a player, that stays in background when clicking on "Done" in the player. And this player should be reached from every view (e.g. through a UIButton in each tab bar View) - just like most radio applications and music apps do.

Would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

For this purpose, you should not use MPMoviePlayerViewController. You can create your own audio player with view and controls, or use third party libraries (search on Google there are plenty of them). Good Luck!

Answer 2

You should not use MPMoviePlayerViewController to play audio because it's designed to play a movie. I recommend using AVPlayer to play audio (if you only care about local audio and you're not streaming from the Internet, AVAudioPlayer is OK too.)

When you play your audio with AVPlayer, it will continue to play even when you app goes into the background.

The view hierarchy of your app should look something like this:

• Root View Controller

  • Tab Bar controller

    • Your view controllers go here
    • A "Now Playing" view controller

A "now playing" view controller will be a view controller that you can put audio controls and display what is playing to your user. You can make your now playing view controller a property in the app delegate or in your root view controller so that you can access it easily. For instance:

id<UIApplicationDelegate> appDelegate = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
[self.navigationController presentViewController:appDelegate.nowPlayingViewController animated:YES completion:nil];

You can add this code to a button for any of your view controllers that needs to display the Now Playing screen.