I'm attempting to write an IOS app that will play my iPhone music library content, showing artwork, and "announcing" title, artist, etc.
I have it working nicely using Apple's Media Player framework. I can display Playlist names and queue the songs in a selected Playlist. I use the "MPMusicPlayerControllerNowPlayingItemDidChange" observer notification to pause playback, retrieve metadata, and do the announcements via AVSpeechSynthesizer. I was a happy camper until I ran into the dreaded "Media Player framwork doesn't respond to observer notifications in background" issue.
So, I started looking at the AVFoundation Framework. I found a sample that plays local song files via URLs in the background and. I'm failing miserably in attempting to retrieve Music Library content via the AVFoundation. I have also failed in supplying content retrieved via the Media Player framework to the AVFoundation player. (Note: The URLs retrieved from MPMediaItem are of a bogus "ipod-library://item/item.m4a?id=#########################" format. Creating AVPlayerItem with this "URL" doesn't work.)
Has anyone managed to accomplish this? I'm developing for my own usage. I have no intention of posting the app in Apple's App Store, so I'm willing to use hidden APIs or un-Apple approved methodology.
A Swift code example would be great. (Objective-C not so much)