How do you access the name, artist, album name off the music stored on the phone in android?

Question

Much like the music app does i want to access the name of the song (not the name of the file) or the artist or album. For example, i want to populate a listview with the names of all the songs on the phone.

Answer 1

There are two approaches to this, one to read the meta tags from the music files themselves and one to use the MediaStore content provider. MediaStore is essentially a public database that you may query for all media related information on the phone.

Using MediaStore is very simple and can be found in the docs here.

Here is a simple example from one of my applications:

String[] proj = { MediaStore.Audio.Media._ID,
MediaStore.Audio.Media.DATA,
MediaStore.Audio.Media.DISPLAY_NAME,
MediaStore.Audio.Artists.ARTIST };

tempCursor = managedQuery(MediaStore.Audio.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI,
                            proj, null, null, null);

tempCursor.moveToFirst(); //reset the cursor
int col_index=-1;
int numSongs=tempCursor.getCount();
int currentNum=0;
do{
  col_index = tempCursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Artists.ARTIST);
  artist = tempCursor.getString(col_index);
  //do something with artist name here
  //we can also move into different columns to fetch the other values
  }
  currentNum++;
}while(tempCursor.moveToNext());