Introduction

Now that we've explored graphics and animations in the previous chapters, it's time to look at the sound options available in Android. The two most popular options to play sound are the following:

• SoundPool: This is for short sound clips
• MediaPlayer: This isdesigned for larger sound files (such as music) and video files

The first two recipes will look at using these libraries. We'll also look at how to use hardware related to sound, such as the volume controls and media playback controls (play, pause, next and previous, often available on headphones).

The rest of the chapter will focus on using the camera, both indirectly through Intents (to pass the camera request to the default camera application) and directly using the camera APIs. We'll show a complete example using  the  Camera2 APIs released with Android 5.0 Lollipop (API 21).