Error: There was an issue creating the audio player

[claudiotellez]

Hello, and thank you for maintaining this plugin.

I'm working on an app that generates a WAV file and stores it in the user's device, based on some settings that the user specifies on the app. After the audio file is generated, it plays the audio using the capacitor-community/native-audio. The Audio must play even when the app is sent to the background.

The above works on iOS, but I couldn't get the capacitor-community/native-audio to play the audio when the user sends the app to the background. This is a known issue which is why I wanted to try this plugin.

The issue is that when I try to preload the audio before playing it, I will get an error: 'There was an issue creating the audio player', which is not very descriptive of what the problem is.

1. The URI to the generated wav file is correct since the Native-Audio plugin is able to play it on Android. I'm storing it on Directory.Cache.
2. I'm using the background audio create example from /Examples.

Do you have an idea of what the problem might be? LMK if I can provide other details, and thank you in advance.

Here's an example of the code:

// index.ts

const useAudioPlayer = isPlatform('android') ? true : false;
const timerAudioSegmentId = 'timer-audio-track-0';

/**
* Preloads Audio in the player
*/
const preloadAudio = async (assetId:string, assetPath:string) => {
  return new Promise(async (resolve, reject) => {
	  if(useAudioPlayer) {
  
		  await AudioPlayer.create({
			  audioId: assetId,	
			  audioSource: assetPath,
			  friendlyTitle: '',
			  useForNotification: false,
			  isBackgroundMusic: true,
			  loop: false,
		  })
		  .catch(reject)
  
		  await AudioPlayer.initialize({audioId: assetId})
		  .catch(reject)
  
		  resolve({success: true})
	  } else {
		  NativeAudio.preload({
			  assetId: assetId,
			  assetPath: assetPath,
			  audioChannelNum: 1,
			  isUrl: true
		  })
		  .then(resolve)
		  .catch(reject);
	  }
  });
}

// plays the audio
const playAudio = async (assetId:string, time: number = 0) => {

  if(useAudioPlayer) {
	AudioPlayer.play({
		audioId: assetId,
	});

	AudioPlayer.seek({
		audioId: assetId,
		timeInSeconds: time,
	});
  } else {
	NativeAudio.play({
		assetId: assetId,
		time: time,
	});
  }
}

// generates the 'timer-audio-track-0' audio and returns the URI to the file
const URIAudio = await generateAudio(timerAudioSegmentId);

// preloads the audio before playing. THIS IS WHERE IT BREAKS
await preloadAudio(timerAudioSegmentId, URIAudio)
.catch((error) => console.error(error))

await playAudio(timerAudioSegmentId);

[wsamoht]

You should be seeing an exception in the error too 🤔 as it's passed to reject.

Either way, your issue is that you must have an audio source with useForNotification = true first. You cannot just have one with isBackgroundMusic = true.

[claudiotellez]

Gotcha, that makes sense. And thank you for your answer.

Basically what I'm trying to do is to start the audio playing while the app is open, and if the user sends the app to the background it should keep playing the audio. This audio should not interrupt Spotify or any other media playing, so it should not play in native media player; almost like a notification.

Is there any way I can achieve this with this plugin? and if not, do you have any recommendations?

[wsamoht]

My guess is that you cannot play in the background on Android without interrupting other media playing. You would have to research that.

Another community audio plugin is https://github.com/eduardoRoth/media-player that you could take a look at. They are also using ExoPlayer and setting the content type to AUDIO_CONTENT_TYPE_MOVIE - source and usage to USAGE_MEDIA.

We both set handleAudioFocus to true.

See https://developer.android.com/media/optimize/audio-focus for more info.

[claudiotellez]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. It makes total sense.

Is it possible to at least prevent the audio of the app to not show in the phones media player?

I assume that the only way to enable this at this point is to create a custom plugin and manage audio focus (set handleAudioFocus to false) to prevent the audio from interrupting other media playing.

Just for reference this app has the expected behavior: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.smartwod.workouts&hl=en_US. If start a timer with several rounds, and rests, it will play the beeps without interrupting any other media playing.

[wsamoht]

Yeah, but you could of course fork an existing plugin to have a starting point.

[claudiotellez]

That's a great idea - thank you @wsamoht 🙏