For some time, I've been aware that the warning "MediaPlayer finalized without being released" was occasionally showing up in my app's logcat output. This was a bit mystifying since I don't use MediaPlayer anywhere, but there were more important things to work on.
Today I finally got fed up and tried to figure out what was going on. It turns out that ringtones are the culprit. RingtoneManager.getRingtone() calls open() on the Ringtone object it returns. Ringtone.open() sets up a MediaPlayer. And this MediaPlayer is only released if you call Ringtone.stop() before letting the thing get GC'ed. Note that you do not actually need to play the ringtone for this to be true. As far as I can tell, none of this is documented.
Anyway, I have no idea how much harm there is in neglecting to stop your ringtones and release their media players, but doing so will at least get rid of a warning message.
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