Introduction

player-sdk-swift

This audio player SDK is written in Swift 4 and runs on iPhones and iPads from iOS 9 to now.

An example app using this player SDK can be run from the XCode-Project in the repository app-example-ios.

Why yet another player?

This audio player SDK offers low latency live and on-demand streaming with a high stability. All current features see below:

Specifications
Audio Formats	MP3, AAC, Ogg/Opus
Streaming Compatibility	Icecast, ICY, Ybrid, HTTP, HTTPS, File
Player features	Play, Stop, Pause
Ybrid features	Swap item, Swap service, max bit-rate
Timeshift features	Wind back, wind forward, wind to live, wind to date, skip back (to item type), skip forward (to item type) ItemTypes: News, Music, Voice, Weather, Traffic, Jingle, Advertisement, Comedy, Unknown
Metadata	ICY (MP3, AAC), VorbisComments (Opus Tags), Ybrid (e.g. current, next)
OS-compatibility	iOS 9 - now
Runtime / language requirement	≥ Swift 4
Loggin	Unified Logging System
SDK Integration	Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods
Device storage limit	128 MB (adjustable)
Flow control & playback	Buffer status reporting, Automatic handling of network problems
Monetization	≥ VAST 3.0

How to use

After integrating the framework into your project, use the following lines of Swift code to listen to your radio:

import YbridPlayerSDK

let myEndpoint = MediaEndpoint(mediaUri: "https://democast.ybrid.io/adaptive-demo")
try AudioPlayer.open(for: myEndpoint, listener: nil) {
    (control) in /// called asychronously

    control.play()
    sleep(10) /// listen to audio

    control.stop()
    /// ...
    control.close()
}
sleep(10) /// of course the program must not end here

AudioPlayer.open first detects the transmission protocol and encoding of the audio content and metadata and then returns a playback control asynchronously. A media-specific control can be taken from the full open method, see README_Ybrid.

Possible playback states of the player are

public enum PlaybackState {
    case buffering 
    case playing 
    case stopped 
    case pausing 
}

With mediaUri addressing an on-demand file, you can safely use control.pause() if control.canPause is true.

As a developer, you probably want to receive changes of the playback state. Implement AudioPlayerListener and pass it via the listener parameter above. You will also receive changes of metadata, hints on problems like network stalls as well as relevant durations and playback buffer size.

public protocol AudioPlayerListener : class {
    func stateChanged(_ state: PlaybackState)
    func metadataChanged(_ metadata: Metadata)
    func error(_ severity:ErrorSeverity, _ exception: AudioPlayerError)
    func playingSince(_ seconds: TimeInterval?)
    func durationReadyToPlay(_ seconds: TimeInterval?)
    func durationConnected(_ seconds: TimeInterval?)
    func bufferSize(averagedSeconds: TimeInterval?, currentSeconds: TimeInterval?)
}

In case of network stalls, the state will change from playing to buffering at the time of exhausting audio buffer. Try it out! After reconnecting to a network, the player will resume.

Errors are raised when occurring. Your handling may use the message, the code, or just ErrorSeverity of AudioPlayerError.

Further interfaces concern product version and handling of memory issues.

Development environment

We use XCode version 12 with swift 4 and CocoaPods 1.10. According to the nature of evolved XCFrameworks, 'player-sdk-swift.xcworkspace' should be compatible with elder versions of XCode.

To generate the release artifact 'YbridPlayerSDK.xcframework', we use a shell script written for macOS's terminal, currently version 11.2. Since it wraps xcodebuild commands, it should be easily translated to other operating systems.

Integration

'YbridPlayerSDK.xcframework' uses 'YbridOpus.xcframework' and 'YbridOgg.xcframework'.

If you use Cocoapods

The Cocoa Podfile of a project using this audio player should look like

platform :ios, '9.0'
target 'app-example-ios' do
  use_frameworks!
  source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'
  pod 'YbridPlayerSDK'
end

If you use Swift Packages

A Swift Package uses YbridPlayerSDK as Swift Package with the following lines (three Packages) in Package.swift:

// swift-tools-version:5.3
  ...
  dependencies: [
    .package(
        name: "YbridOpus",
        url: "[e-mail]:ybrid/opus-swift.git",
        from: "0.8.0"),
    .package(
        name: "YbridOgg",
        url: "[e-mail]:ybrid/ogg-swift.git",
        from: "0.8.0"),

    .package(
        name: "YbridPlayerSDK",
        url: "[e-mail]:ybrid/player-sdk-swift.git",
        from: "0.13.1"),
  ...

Or in a Xcode project, choose "File" -> "Swift Packages" -> "Add Package Dependency" three times and pass url, version and name above. Have a look at the properties editor, and ensure the Packages are shown in section 'Frameworks, Libraries and Embedded Content' of the target's 'General' tab.

If you don't use CocoaPods or Swift Packages

If you manage packages in another way, you may manually download the necessary XCFramewoks and embed them into your project. Take the following assets from the latest release

1. YbridPlayerSDK.xcframework.zip from this repository/releases
2. YbridOgg.xcframework.zip from ybrid/ogg-swift/releases
3. YbridOpus.xcframework.zip from ybrid/opus-swift/releases

Unzip the files into a directory called 'Frameworks' of your XCode project. In the properties editor, drag and drop the directories into the section 'Frameworks, Libraries and Embedded Content' of the target's 'General' tab. Please report any issue to tell us your need.

Further documentation

An excellent start to dive into technical details is the overview.

For a deeper insight into the structure of metadata and the power of ybrid see Ybrid docs.

Contributing

You are welcome to contribute in many ways.

Licenses

This project uses ogg-swift and opus-swift which are MIT licensed. Ogg and Opus carry BSD licenses, see 3rd party section in the LICENSE file.