Iphone: How to show list of songs from library inside application

Question

I want to show the list of all songs from the user's ipod in a list inside my application. When the user clicks a song I want to store the name of the this song.

I also later want to grab the name of that song and play it (but not right away).

Any ideas where to start for this? I know it is probably somewhere in the Media.Player framework but I can't seem to figure out how to actual view the list of songs from inside the application

Answer 1

You can call up the MPMediaPickerController using this:

- (IBAction) selectSong: (id) sender 
{   
    MPMediaPickerController *picker =
    [[MPMediaPickerController alloc] initWithMediaTypes: MPMediaTypeMusic];

    picker.delegate                     = self;
    picker.allowsPickingMultipleItems   = NO;
    picker.prompt                       = NSLocalizedString (@"Select any song from the list", @"Prompt to user to choose some songs to play");

    [self presentModalViewController: picker animated: YES];
}

Then you can add the songs that were selected to your own array using something like this.

Note: You will access meta-data information from each track using valueForProperty.

- (void) mediaPicker: (MPMediaPickerController *) mediaPicker didPickMediaItems: (MPMediaItemCollection *) mediaItemCollection 
{
    [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated: YES];
    someMutableArray = [mediaItemCollection mutableCopy];
}

Then this is kind of self explanatory but necessary:

- (void) mediaPickerDidCancel: (MPMediaPickerController *) mediaPicker 
{   
    [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated: YES]; 
}

For more information visit Apple's iPod Library Access Programming Guide