Playing music, podcasts, or other audio is one of the most common activities for smartphones in 2016. Most of the time, audio plays in the background while we are driving, cleaning, working out, or cooking. Architecting your application to support background audio playback is standard fare whether you are incorporating the standard Android MediaPlayer API or using a library, like ExoPlayer.
I want to briefly walk through how I architected PremoFM, an open source podcast player, to play audio in the background using ExoPlayer. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point for the transition to ExoPlayer 2. If you want to learn more about ExoPlayer 2, check out my previous post, Exploring ExoPlayer 2.
The Architecture
In order to play audio in the background (or do anything in the background) the process that manages playback should be based on the Service class. Services, on Android, allow background work to be done without needing to have a user interface in the foreground. Naturally, I based the background audio playback of PremoFM on a Service, the PodcastPlayerService. It is obviously doing a lot. It manages audio playback, updates the database, listens for events like a headphone disconnection, and manages the persistent notification. Initially, most of my code involving direct management of the ExoPlayer was also embedded directly in this service. This led to a bloated class and a highly coupled design. I re-architected things when I added Google Cast support by creating a generic MediaPlayer abstract class.
The abstract class provided a common set of methods for interacting with ExoPlayer like, playing a media file, fast forward & rewind, getting playback state information, and changing the playback speed. All I needed to do was extend my MediaPlayer abstract class, using ExoPlayer. This resulted in all of my ExoPlayer code existing in one class, LocalMediaPlayer.
This will make my upgrade to ExoPlayer 2 significantly easier than if I had continued the previous architecture. All of the code that needs to change exists in one place. In my next article I will get into the nitty gritty of my migration.
Feel free to take a swing at it before I do. Check out the source code for PremoFM from GitHub and hack away.
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