Chapter    12

Media Library Access and Playback

Every iOS device, at its core, is a first-class media player. Out of the box, people can listen to music, podcasts, and audio books, as well as watch movies and videos.

iOS SDK applications have always been able to play sounds and music, but Apple has been extending the functionality with each iOS release. iOS 3 gave us the MediaPlayer framework, which, among other things, provided access to the user’s audio library; iOS 5 extended this by giving us access to video stored in the user’s library. iOS7 gave us speech synthesis and text-to-speech, which are used extensively to powering Siri.

iOS 4 extended the AVFoundation framework, which offers finer control of playing, recording, and editing of ...

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