iOS 8.4 Beta - Unable to play Audiobooks using the [MPMusicPlayerController systemMusicPlayer]

Starting with the iOS 8.4 Beta, we are unable to playback Audiobooks using MPMusicPlayerController's systemMusicPlayer API. We've also tried with iPodMusicPlayer with the same result.


It looks like the systemMusicPlayer still commands the Music App, but with Audiobooks moved to iBooks, there doesn't seem to be a way to play Audiobooks anymore. We can continue to see the list of Audiobooks using MPMediaQuery APIs.


Starting with iOS 8.4, what is the new way to play Audiobooks? Is there a new API? or is this a bug in iOS 8.4 beta?


Thanks,


Ronak Patel


PS We came to WWDC as well; but were unable to find any Apple Engineers that were familiar with the MPMediaLibrary APIs.

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ronak2121
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This is resolved in the final versions of iOS 8.4.

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ronak2121
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The existing API will work just fine for us on iOS 8.3 and below (we support from iOS 7.0 and up). So, how can we detect whether we should be using the new API or the existing API (MPMusicPlayerController)? We would like to avoid an iOS version check if at all possible here.


For now, our only course of action is to stop supporting playback of Audiobooks from the Music/iBooks app on iOS 8.4 and beyond. We tried to get the asset url out of the MPMediaItems for songs as well as audiobooks, but it always comes back as nil: see related forum posting: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/5613

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ronak2121
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This is resolved in the final versions of iOS 8.4.

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ronak2121
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I don't think it's resolved at all. My app is all about playing music files from the user's music library. It works fine with everything but audio books in iOS 8.4. With audio books, nothing works right: asking a track to play often starts a different track, and the currently playing item is incorrectly reported and is not updated.

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mattn
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Did you ever get a handle on this? I'm having the same problem...

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3no
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Me too.

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petber
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