How to check something at regular intervals?

Question

Beginner here, I have a simple question.

In Android what would be the best what to check for something at regular intervals?

Please bear with me, I'll try to explain the best I can --

For example my audio app is very simple, a main activity and a service. The main activity has a UI with two buttons, start and stop audio. I press start and the audio service starts. Likewise when I click Stop the service stops and the audio ends. If isLooping() is hard-coded to true there is no issue because the audio never ends unless I hit stop button, which stops the audio service and also resets the button states.

This is an issue now because I set isLooping() to false so the audio doesn't loop. So the audio will stop playing but the service is still running.

I want to be able to detect when the audio stops so I can set the states of the UI buttons. So I need something that is always checking whether audio is playing (i.e. check player.isPlaying() so I can end the service and set the enable/disable state of the buttons.

I figured out binding to the service so I can access the MediaPlayer controls via my main activity so I know the code to check if it's playing, but WHERE do I put this code so it's checked all the time?

Am I making sense? I know this is probably very simple. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You can repeat it with the TimerTask and Timer. Code below:

public final void RepeatSoundFunction(){ 

      t = new Timer();
      tt = new TimerTask() {

          @Override
          public void run() {
              mp.seekTo(0); //Reset sound to beginning position
              mp.start();  //Start the sound
              t.purge();  //Purge the sound
          }

      };
      t.schedule(tt, 10*1000); //Schedule to run tt (TimerTask) again after 10 seconds         
}

then you set a MediaPlayer onCompletionListener and in there you put this.

Inside the run-code you can check for other things than music, I just show an example with the audio.

Answer 2

check this article out http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/timed-ui-updates.html