Control the default music player of android or any other music player

Question

How to control the default music player of android or any other player? By controlling i mean pause, play, next etc. Do i have to bind the service? I have tried to use the <

Answer 1

KeyEvent's don't work properly in newest Android, as well as don't support applications like Spotify. The best solution is to use MediaController. For each application that is currently playing and you want to control it you have to create different MediaController. It requires Context and MediaSession.Token. Token 'identifies' process that plays music. For example if you played Google Play Music and you now play Spotify you can create MediaControllers for both. How to retrieve tokens? There are two ways:

• Get list from MediaSessionManager. You can find it in Google example project
• Get it from Notifications - if you have access to Notifications (NotificationListenerService) you can search for notifications from music apps and get their current Token.

You check current state of session from MediaController:

getPlaybackState().getState() //e.g. PlaybackStateCompat.STATE_PLAYING

and control app using transport controls, e.g.:

getTransportControls().skipToNext()

Depending on your minSDK use Compat or not version. You can cast MediaSession.Token to MediaSessionCompat.Token with:

MediaSessionCompat.Token.fromToken(token)