Pro Android Media: Developing Graphics, Music, Video, and Rich Media Apps for Smartphones and Tablets

Chapter 6

Background and Networked Audio

In the last chapter, we explored Android's basic audio playback capabilities. While those capabilities are fantastic, we need to push a bit further to make them generally useful. In this chapter, we'll look at how we can do things like play audio files in the background so that the application playing the audio doesn't need to be running. We'll take a look at how we can synthesize sound rather than just playing sound files, and we'll look at how to leverage streaming audio that is available on the Internet.