State Diagram of the MediaPlayer Class

• The playing of the audio or video file using MediaPlayer is done using a state machine.
• The following image is the MediaPlayer state diagram.

• In the above MediaPlayer state diagram, the oval shape represents the state of the MediaPlayer instance resides in.

• There are two types of arcs showing in the state diagram. One with the single arrowhead represents the synchronous method calls of the MediaPlayer instance and one with the double arrowhead represents the asynchronous calls.

• The release method which is one of the important element in the MediaPlayer API. This helps in releasing the Memory resources allocated for the Mediaplayer instance when it is not needed anymore. Refer to How to Clear or Release Audio Resources in Android? to know how the memory allocated by the Mediaplayer can be released. So that the memory management is done accordingly.
• If the stop() method is called using Mediaplayer instance, then it needs to prepared for the next playback.
• The MediaPlayer can be moved to the specific time position using seekTo() method so that the MediaPlayer instance can continue playing the Audio or Video playback from that specified position.
• The focus of the audio playback should be managed accordingly using the AudioManager service which is discussed in the article How to Manage Audio Focus in Android?.
• The following image is the summarised version of the MediaPlayer state diagram.

MediaPlayer Class in Android is used to play media files. Those are Audio and Video files. It can also be used to play audio or video streams over the network. So in this article, the things discussed are:

• MediaPlayer State diagram
• Creating a simple audio player using MediaPlayer API. Have a look at the following image. Note that we are going to implement this project using the Kotlin language.