Streaming mp3 audio with AVPlayer

Question

I'm hearing some conflicting reports about this. What I'm trying to do is stream an mp3 file from a URL. I've done hours of research, but I cannot find any good guides on how to do this, or even what kind of audio player I should use.

Some friends tell me that AVPlayer can stream mp3, but the Apple documentation says it can't. I've poured over Matt Gallagher's audio streamer (http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2008/09/streaming-and-playing-live-mp3-stream.html), but that code was made a good while ago, and I'm new enough to this that it's hard to work through the autoreleases and retains and all that.

The audio I'm trying to stream is a fairly large mp3 file from a libsyn server, with a URL of format..

http://traffic.libsyn.com/podcastname/episode.mp3

All I need to do is grab it and start playing, with the ability to pause and scrub. So first things first, CAN AVPlayer stream mp3's? And if so, does anybody have any guides or code they can point me to? And if not, is there any kind of audio player class that can stream audio?

I've tried creating an AVPlayerItem, initialized with the URL, then adding it to an AVPlayer, but I'm getting a ton of Error Loading... and Symbol Not Found... errors. I'd appreciate any information on this, thank you!

Sumit Mundra Sumit Mundra · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-31T11:32:08

try this

 -(void)playselectedsong{

        AVPlayer *player = [[AVPlayer alloc]initWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:urlString]];
        self.songPlayer = player;
        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                                 selector:@selector(playerItemDidReachEnd:)
                                                     name:AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification
                                                   object:[songPlayer currentItem]];
        [self.songPlayer addObserver:self forKeyPath:@"status" options:0 context:nil];
        [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:0.1 target:self selector:@selector(updateProgress:) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];



    }
    - (void)observeValueForKeyPath:(NSString *)keyPath ofObject:(id)object change:(NSDictionary *)change context:(void *)context {

        if (object == songPlayer && [keyPath isEqualToString:@"status"]) {
            if (songPlayer.status == AVPlayerStatusFailed) {
                NSLog(@"AVPlayer Failed");

            } else if (songPlayer.status == AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay) {
                NSLog(@"AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay");
                [self.songPlayer play];


            } else if (songPlayer.status == AVPlayerItemStatusUnknown) {
                NSLog(@"AVPlayer Unknown");

            }
        }
    }

    - (void)playerItemDidReachEnd:(NSNotification *)notification {

     //  code here to play next sound file

    }

Streaming mp3 audio with AVPlayer

5 Answers