Playing audio from amr on Android

Question

I can receive a byte array from a Socket. I need to play audio from this byte array - the audio is encoded with AMR 8000Hz.

I found that I can play AMR audio with MediaPlayer. However, MediaPlayer can't play music from byte array, and I don't want to write them to file.

Is there a way to play AMR sound from byte array on android?

Answer 1

The Android framework allows you to play back audio data directly from memory using the AudioTrack class; the drawback is that the audio must already be decoded into PCM data. If you are lucky enough to target Android 4.1, there are new APIs that allow you to decode the data separately so it can be passed to AudioTrack (see MediaExtractor and MediaCodec). However, prior to that there were no exposed APIs for encoding/decoding beyond MediaRecorder and MediaPlayer.

If targeting a version of Android prior to 4.1 (which I imagine you probably are) you have two options:

• Find a 3rd party decoder for the AMR data so you can pass it on to AudioTrack
• Save your data to a file (even temporarily) so it can be handed to MediaPlayer

HTH