How to play sounds using AVAudioPlayer

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

The most common way to play a sound on iOS is using AVAudioPlayer, and it's popular for a reason: it's easy to use, you can stop it whenever you want, and you can adjust its volume as often as you need. The only real catch is that you must store your player as a property or other variable that won't get destroyed straight away – if you don't, the sound will stop immediately.

AVAudioPlayer is part of the AVFoundation framework, so you'll need to import that:

import AVFoundation

Like I said, you need to store your audio player as a property somewhere so it is retained while the sound is playing. In our example we're going to play a bomb explosion sound, so I created a property for it like this:

var bombSoundEffect: AVAudioPlayer?

With those two lines of code inserted, all you need to do is play your audio file. This is done first by finding where the sound is in your project using path(forResource:), then creating a file URL out of it. That can then get passed to AVAudioPlayer to create an audio player object, at which point – finally – you can play the sound. Here's the code:

let path = Bundle.main.path(forResource: "example.mp3", ofType:nil)!
let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: path)

do {
    bombSoundEffect = try AVAudioPlayer(contentsOf: url)
    bombSoundEffect?.play()
} catch {
    // couldn't load file :(
}

If you want to stop the sound, you should use its stop() method.