Check/observe what is currently being played by the Android system - android

I'm looking for a solution to observe what the app is currently playing. At minimum I would need to know what URI is being used to play Media and what is current playback position.
We are giving developers API with media content (MP3/HLS files) and to give them the best experience we are asking them to send various events to our API. Based on those events we can prepare better content for their users. We would like to ease the process of tracking events by implementing library that will be responsible for tracking those events. To do it we need to observe/query what their app is currently playing and what is a playback position. That's why I'm looking for a solution that will let me do this without caring too much what kind of player app is using (MediaPlayer, ExoPlayer or any other solution).
Is there any tool that will let me check those informations?

Related

Extracting and Streaming audio from YouTube videos in Android

I'm trying to find a way to separate and stream the audio from a youtube video given it's url/video ID. I've looked into youtube extractors and most of them are pretty old or no longer maintained. I'm working in Kotlin and jetpack compose. I found an app, newpipe, that does exactly what I want, but the codebase is huge and it's way beyond my experience. I'd like to play it in the background as well, so I suppose I would use exoplayer in combination with a background service. My only obstacle is obtaining the audio from it's url. Is there a quick and dirty way to achieve this within the context of an Android app?

Android - Get the title/position/duration of the video currently playing in another app

I have an idea of the app which will listen for metadata of the currently playing video in another app (Netflix for example) and analyze this metadata. For example, when user starts playing a movie in his Netflix app I want to request some IMDB-based information about this movie in my own running app. In order to do this I need some metadata, the title of the movie at least or anything else. If in addition to the static metadata it's possible to listen for any other lifetime data like the current position/duration, playing/paused states it would be great.
The questions are as follows:
Do you think it's possible at any Android (mobile/TV) platform?
If it's possible technically, doesn't it violate any rules?
I'd appreciate any links or guidance.
Unless other apps expose that, you can't do that on non modified Android.

How to detect the current playing video in the official Youtube app

I want to implement an application that listens for events from the official Youtube Application, I've been digging into a lot of question here in Stackoverflow but I couldn't find a good answer.
I want to listen when a video start and pause/stop, I've seen in the logcat some relevant information. The only thing that is missing is the video ID. But maybe there is another better way to get this information.
And I know It is possible because that's exactly what Musixmatch does:
Thank you
Please refer to Android MediaController (https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/media2/session/MediaController) which -
Allows an app to interact with an active MediaSession or a MediaSessionService which would provide MediaSession. Media buttons and other commands can be sent to the session.

Accessing Metadata from currently playing audio. (Builtin or External App)

I am trying to develop an app/widget for which I need display the currently playing information (metadata) of an audio track.
This would be trivial if I was also writing the MediaPlayer myself, as I could simply access the MediaStore and bring up the info, however, I do not wish to compete with the plethora of existing apps on this front. I want to be able to pull this inforrmation from the builtin audio player or other app such as SongBird or PowerAMP.
I should be able to do this with PowerAMP using their [API][1], but have, but I really want a solution that works for the stock android player and others too.
I was hoping to be able to grab the information from the AudioManager, but that seems only to allow me to query the current state (Music is playing et) and I can set my intent to play music, etc... But no access to metadata from someone elses app.
So my thought is this cannot be done easily. My thoughts are that I could maybe access this info from the info bar at the top as the now playing info is printed up there. It might be an ugly hack though...
For a moment I got excited about the RemoteControlClient.MetadataEditor from 4.0, but then I figured out that it was for writing that information to a stream that can be sent to the physical remote, rather than allowing you to create a software remote. Damn!
Does anyone have any ideas?
[1]: http://forum.powerampapp.com/index.php?/topic/1034-updated-for-20-poweramp-api-lib-and-sample-applications/ Power AMP
I've written a guide for implementing this.
Basically, you need to have access to hidden classes of android.jar library. Then you have to extend IRemoteControlDisplay$Stub class, and implement it's methods.
After that you register your RemoteControlDisplay with hidden method - AudioManager#registerRemoteControlDisplay.
There is just way too much to explain in one answer, so read my guide on XDA-Developers.
Here is the link:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=44513199
Also, I'm currently working on a library which will simplify the process of implementing you remote media controls.
I should be able to do this with PowerAMP using their [API][1], but have, but I really want a solution that works for the stock android player and others too.
There is no documented and supported API for the AOSP Music app or the Google Play Music app, AFAIK. They certainly are not in the Android SDK.
I am not aware of an Android ecosystem standard for media players exposing this information, let alone a roster of apps that support such a standard. You are welcome to work with the developers of such apps and encourage them to create and adopt a standard.
My thoughts are that I could maybe access this info from the info bar at the top as the now playing info is printed up there.
It is not possible to spy on other applications' Notifications, for obvious privacy and security reasons.
For a moment I got excited about the RemoteControlClient.MetadataEditor from 4.0, but then I figured out that it was for writing that information to a stream that can be sent to the physical remote, rather than allowing you to create a software remote. Damn!
Surely there's a way to access the Remote Control Client metadata on Android 4.0, because the lock screen is able to access it when media is playing.
I'm not a developer at all, but I've tried to do a bit of poking around in the AOKP sources and this is my limited understanding of how it works. At least in AOKP (and presumably AOSP as well, then), it appears that the lockscreen uses core/java/com/android/internal/widget/TransportControlView.java to draw the music control widget on the lockscreen, which in turn uses media/java/android/media/IRemoteControlDisplay.aidl for data retrieval. At the very least, it may be useful to poke around in TransportControlView.java to see if you can figure out how the lockscreen widget works.

Is there something in the Android architecture or API that prevents people from creating MP3 players that read embedded lyrics?

When I play certain MP3 files (such as lessons from JapanesePod101.com) on my iPod Touch, lyrics or transcripts that are embedded in the MP3 files are displayed in the media player. The lyrics are, I believe, stored as ID3/ID4 tags in the MP3 metadata.
I find this to be an extremely useful feature, and I believe I'm not alone. Despite that, neither the stock Android media player nor any other media player I've downloaded from the Market seems to support this. I just have not been able to find any way to get feature on my Nexus One.
This feature is important enough to me that I'm considering learning Android development just so I can write a simple media player that displays embedded lyrics or notes. However, the fact that nobody else seems to have done this makes me wonder - is it even possible? Is there something in the Android architecture or APIs that make it difficult or impossible to read and display lyrics information from MP3 files? I'd hate to get deep into the learning process and find out what I'm aiming for can't easily be done. (I mean, if all else fails I assume I could write my own MP3-decoder, but that's more trouble than I'm willing to go through right now).
I've already asked this question on the Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange Beta Site, but in retrospect I decided it was more of a programming question and decided it was better to ask here.
Yeah, definitely more of a programming question. Just from my brief experience of reading through the ID3 spec, I think it's probably just that decoding ID3 tags is a complete PITA. I'm sure it can be done, as there are MP3 tag editing apps available for Android (whether any support lyrics or not, I do not know).
ID3v2.3 seems to have support for both synchronized and unsynchronized lyrics through the SYLT and USLT frames of the header. I imagine it's just such an underused feature that it isn't worth the effort to most to do so. Purchased MP3s don't carry this information (I've always wondered why not?), so they would have to manually be added (or automatically via a lyric service API, but there's a lot more coding involved with that).
Here is the ID3v2.3 spec if you'd like to look into it further...(abandon hope all ye who enter here)
The problem may be that most people would use the built-in mp3 playback mechanisms, and this may neither support lyric display nor be very easy to keep synchronized with something else doing lyric display.
So it may be that something needs to be written which does it's own mp3 decoding.
Most likely this would want to be done in native code. On the other hand, on android, audio output (and unless you use opengl, video display) pretty much has to be done from java. So you are looking at a fair amount of work to decode data with a native library and then dispatch it for playback and display from java.
So to answer your question - is it possible? Definitely
Is it made easy by the android APIs? - not really
I just added a new feature request that would give Android support for reading USLT in the ID3 tag. This will enable the native and 3rd party music players to display lyrics. If you want this feature, please star the request below, and post your comments.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=32547

Categories

Resources