run code in a non-UI thread android

Question

I have an image application and I'm playing music while the images are displayed. Right now, I have both the functionality in the UI thread.

I want to move the music playback part of it into another thread that is different from the UI thread.

How do I achieve this?

The complication if I use handlers and runnables:

the run() has to have everything that is to be executed but the music code is scattered all over the place because it is event based and there's a different piece of code to execute each time

so the only way i can implement this with handler and runnable is if I have several runnables each doing a particular function which means that all the music code will not run in the same thread, they would run in different threads which is not a good thing.

So how do you do this?

Answer 1

This is what I did:

 public static void startTrack() {
    PLAYER_STATE = IS_PLAYING;
            /*Setup the handler and runnable*/
    mMusicHandler = new Handler() {         
    }; 

    mMusicRunnable = new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
             Log.d(TAG,"inside Music Runnable");
            try {
                mPlayer.start();        
            } catch (IllegalStateException e) {
                Log.d(TAG,"ILLEGAL STATE-START");
                handleIllegalState();
            }
        }
    };
    mMusicHandler.post(mMusicRunnable);

}

So only the start part of the music setup is done on a different thread.