Creating a music streaming server and live music playing android client

I’d an awesome experience when I was in Smart India Hackathon Finals and we’d worked on one problem of public announcement system. So, I’ve decided to write a blog on how to make a simple audio/music streaming server in NodeJS and a simple android app which will stream the real-time audio. By using following code you can make your own local simple music streaming server and that music can be listened on an android client or a browser in real-time. So, let’s open the oven to cook this recipe.

Creating a simple Music Streaming Server

You can make your own streaming server by using anything but the simplest way I’ve found here is to use the open source software SWYH ( Stream What You Hear ). You can check the official site here. This application is availabel only for windows and can be downloaded from here. You can also use the IceCast as well.

The important thing here is that we are not lifting that creepy load of maintaining a buffer and then streaming the audio chunks over the request with the help of some code. We are using these software to handle the weight for us, thus it becomes easy to get a url on which an audio is streamed.

Once you’ve installed the SWYH follow the steps from here Getting-Started. If everything goes right you’ll end up with the following sreenshot:

Here you can check the URL as some local address of the server and the route of /stream/swyh.mp3. To listen the music you have to connect to the same wifi-network to which the machine with SWYH is connected. You can create a simple hotspot or you may connect to your own network in home. This is must that those devices who want to listen the stream should be connected to the same network. Now we’re ready to move forward.

You can simply just paste the URL shown by the SWYH to browser and Bingo!! You can listen the music on that device as well. Of course, someone needs to play the music on the machine with SWYH installed. Now you have your streaming server ready and we can build the android app. Don’t worry if you did not understand the above thing so far, it’ll get clear as we go further or you may check the documentation of SWYH to get clear understanding.

Creating a NodeJS streaming server

Let’s suppose that you want to make your streaming public and everyone in the world can listen the awesome playlist you have with Weekend, Linkin-Park, Queen (My favourite one: I want to break free ;-)etc. You can make a simple nodeJS server to pipe the stream which is currently streamed by the SWYH software.

To pipe the stream to some different URL we can use request node module. All you have to do is to first install request node module.

$ npm install request --save

Once you have installed the request module, you can use this in your Express server

var express = require('express');    var path = require('path');    var request = require('request');        var app = express()        app.get('/playback.mp3', function(req, res){        //the request module is piping the steam over the get request coming on playback.mp3    request.get('http://<your-swyh-url:56789>/stream/swyh.mp3').pipe(res, function(error){       		console.log(error);       });    });        //here the server is localhost and listening on the port 8000    app.listen(8000,function(){	console.log("Listening on 8000");    });

As you can see we are piping the streaming from one URL to other URL i.e from one server to other server. Here, I would like to mention that you can use any link in the request.get(...) function. As an example, you can use this one as well.

//....request.get('http://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/KUFXFM_SC').pipe(res,function(error){//.... });

And Bingo!! Now you know how to make a simple Music Streaming Server !!! Here half of the recipe gets completed.

Baking an android client

Creating an android client app for listening the live stream audio is very easy. We are going to use the existing MediaPlayer class from android framework. Checkout the description here.

It handles the audio buffering in background and audio can be listened from the speakers of android device. Here is the code inside of an onCreate() method:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {    //....//declaring the MediaPlayer    MediaPlayer mp;            @Override    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {    	super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);        //...        //...        String streamURL = "your-music-streaming-url-whatever";        //Instantiating the MediaPlayer class                mp = new MediaPlayer();                //setting the audio stream type to Streaming music        try{            mp.setAudioStreamType(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC);            mp.setDataSource(streamURL);            mp.prepareAsync();        }catch (Exception e){            e.printStackTrace();        }                //catching the error if any        mp.setOnErrorListener((mediaPlayer,what,extra)->{            mediaPlayer.reset();            return false;        });           }

Here, we’ve initialised the MediaPlayer and the audio stream type is set to STREAM_MUSIC. The DataSourceis set to the URL we are using to steam the audio/music.

The interesting thing is the prepareAsync() method. This method creates an asynchronous request to the URL and keeps the network out of the MainThread. The MediaPlayer asynchromously calls the GET method of our server and in response to request the audi packets are sent. The audio packets are captured and stored in buffer.

As the buffer is loaded enough to play some bit of music the Media player is prepared to send the sound to speakers. SetOnPreparedListener is used to check the above case and we can play() the music. The below code shows SetOnPreparedListener written right below the above code.

mp.setOnPreparedListener((mediaPlayer)->{    	//TODO:use some button to play and pause the music        // you can use this with some button click action as well    	if(playButton.isChecked()){        	mp.start();        }else{        	mp.pause();        }            });

mp.start() call will play the sound from your speaker and you can enjoy the delightful music. Wow !!

Now, as we’ve made some mess while making this recipe, we need to place the things right unless we will be facing the tonnes of memory leak in android. In you onDestroy() and onStop() method add the following code and you are good to go:

//...    @Override    protected void onDestroy() {        super.onDestroy();        if (mp!=null){            if (mp.isPlaying()){                mp.stop();            }            mp.release();            mp = null;        }     //...

Alright, I’m going to listen some Queen and Coldplay. Any queries? Comment section is below ↓ .

Genieße die Musik

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