iPhone get all albums/artists

Question

does any of you have example code (or a link to it) of how to retrieve all music albums or artist from the iPod media library?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Use a MPMediaQuery:

MPMediaQuery *allAlbumsQuery = [MPMediaQuery albumsQuery];
NSArray *allAlbumsArray = [allAlbumsQuery collections];

The allItems array does now contain MPMediaItemCollections, grouping is done by album. Now you can walk through the arrays.

for (MPMediaItemCollection *collection in allAlbumsArray) {
    MPMediaItem *item = [collection representativeItem];
}