My app "MC-Timer" supports playing music with a mixture of Apple Music curated playlists, (Apple Music catalog playlists,) Apple Music songs, library playlists as well as individual songs from your media library.
Playback for songs from your media library and for those streamed from Apple Music works well with the iOS media player.
However, for items in your own "catalog playlist", the Apple Music API will return playParams in the JSON response that may look like this:
"playParams": {
"id": "i.DVENxPRTdlJoV",
"kind": "song",
"isLibrary": true,
"reporting": false,
"purchasedId": "253867849"
}
By the way, parsing this into a dictionary of type [String: Any]
is a huge pain and I wish the media player API could just accept the JSON as is. Apple, please add: MPMusicPlayerPlayParameters(json: String)
.
To play this song, one can pass on the dictionary with the parameters to the music player as follows:
if let mppp = MPMusicPlayerPlayParameters(dictionary: playParams) {
// …
}
However, it only captures part of the dictionary:
(lldb) po mppp
<MPMusicPlayerPlayParameters:0x280d983f0 {
id = "i.DVENxPRTdlJoV";
isLibrary = 1;
kind = song;
}>
And when you try to play that:
player.setQueue(with: MPMusicPlayerPlayParametersQueueDescriptor(playParametersQueue: mppp))
player.play()
you will see:
2021-03-12 14:02:37.105160+0100 app[1626:732477] [tcp] tcp_input [C13.1:3] flags=[R] seq=2895265255, ack=0, win=0 state=LAST_ACK rcv_nxt=2895265255, snd_una=3660699433
2021-03-12 14:02:39.764732+0100 app[1626:732039] [SDKPlayback] Failed to prepareToPlay error: Error Domain=MPMusicPlayerControllerErrorDomain Code=6 "Failed to prepare to play" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Failed to prepare to play}
and the music player will play any random song from your library instead.
Neither does it work to play the song via its store identifier:
player.setQueue(with: [ "i.DVENxPRTdlJoV" ])
Apparently, this is a known problem for years, and it has not been fixed.
I hear that the purchaseId
should be used instead, but this is undocumented. Also, if that is the case, the MPMusicPlayerPlayParameters should handle that under the hood.