A Cordova plugin for Android and iOS with native support for audio playlists, background support, and lock screen controls
I have worked with cordova-plugin-media for quite a long time and have pushed it pretty far. In the end it's not designed for certain use cases and I ultimately decided to apply what I had learned, and issues I have seen others have, to create a plugin that better addresses those use cases.
Both Android and iOS have special support for playlist-based playback, and the native implementation provides a superior user experience over attempting to implement a playlist out of an interface designed for single-item playback. Also, it is not possible to implement continuous playback using cordova-plugin-media on iOS, since the space between songs in the background will stop playback. This plugin addresses that, in addition to including support for command center and lock screen controls.
- Playlist support is implemented in native code
- Native playlists mean better support for continual playback in the background
- Background playback is optional - opt-in via runtime config and config.xml flags
- Includes support for lock-screen controls
- Works just as well for a single item as it does for a playlist
- Fully supports streaming URLs, with control of seek-pause behavior (does play resume from where you paused, or does it resume from current live position?)
- Compatible with Cordova Plugman.
- For Android and iOS
On Android, utilizes a wrapper over ExoPlayer called ExoMedia. ExoPlayer is a powerful, high-quality player for Android provided by Google
On iOS, utilizes a customized AVQueuePlayer in order to provide feedback about track changes, buffering, etc.; given that AVQueuePlayer can keep the audio session running between songs.
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This plugin intentionally does not display track cover art on the lock screen controls on iOS. Usage of the media image object on iOS is known to cause memory leaks. See the Todo section. The Swift version of that object does not (seem to) contain this memory leak, and rewriting this plugin to use Swift 4 is on the Todo list. This is fully supported on Android, however.
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This plugin is not designed to play mixable, rapid-fire, low-latency audio, as you would use in a game. A more appropriate cordova plugin for that use case is cordova-plugin-nativeaudio
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Cannot mix audio; again the NativeAudio plugin is probably more appropriate. This is due to supporting the lock screen and command center controls: only an app in command of audio can do this, otherwise the controls have no meaning. I would like to add an option to do this, it should be fairly straightforward; at the cost of not supporting the OS-level controls for that invokation.
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If you are running this on iOS 9.3, this plugin requires a promise polyfill for the JS layer.
As with most cordova plugins...
cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-playlist
Rather than oblige all developers to include background permissions, add the following to your config.xml if you wish to support continuing to play audio in the background:
<config-file target="AndroidManifest.xml" parent="/*">
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WAKE_LOCK" />
</config-file>
<config-file target="*-Info.plist" parent="UIBackgroundModes">
<array>
<string>audio</string>
</array>
</config-file>
Android normally will give you ~2-3 minutes of background playback before killing your audio. Adding the WAKE_LOCK permission allows the plugin to utilize additional permissions to continue playing.
iOS will immediately stop playback when the app goes into the background if you do not include the audio UIBackgroundMode. iOS has an additional requirement that audio playback must never stop; when it does, the audio session will be terminated and playback cannot continue without user interaction.
Be sure to check out the examples folder, where you can find an Angular5/Ionic implementation of the Cordova plugin. Just drop into your project and go.
There's so much more to do on this plugin. Some items I would like to see added if anyone wants to help:
- [iOS, Android] Add support for recording, similar to what is provided by
cordova-plugin-media - [iOS] Safely implement cover art for cover images displayed on the command/lock screen controls
- [iOS] Write this plugin in Swift instead of Objective-C. I didn't have time to learn Swift when I needed this.
- [iOS] Utilize AudioPlayer instead of directly implementing AVQueuePlayer.
AudioPlayerincludes some smart network recovery features - Or, just add the smart network recovery features
- [iOS, Android] Add support for single-item repeat
- [iOS, Android] Add a full example
There are several plugins that are similar to this one, but all are focused on aspects of the media management experience. This plugin takes inspiration from:
- cordova-plugin-media
- ExoMedia
- PlaylistCore (provides player controls on top of ExoMedia)
- Bi-Directional AVQueuePlayer proof of concept
- cordova-music-controls-plugin
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