Dive into the technical aspects of audio on your device, including codecs, format support, and customization options.

Audio Documentation

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Audio player app is silent if device connected via CarPlay
I have a SwiftUI app - (https://youtu.be/VbAfUk_eYl0?si=JxUBh0Bpb-vc1E1U) - which I thought was almost ready for release - a manager for airdropped audio files from Logic Pro or other music creation applications. It uses AVAudioEngine and AVAudioPlayerNode to play audio, and the MediaPlayer API to integrate with car audio and similar, all of which works well. It does not currently have an explicit CarPlay integration (and I'm slightly horrified at the amount of work that is going to require). I had the good or bad luck of getting a loaner car with carplay while mine is being repaired yesterday, and lo and behold, when connected to the vehicle via CarPlay, there is no audio output in the vehicle at all. The now playing panel correctly shows the information my app provides about the currently playing song; the player node believes it is playing, the AVAudioSession is configured as it should be. But there is no sound. Obviously I cannot ship it in this state. I've tried fiddling with the parameters the AVAudioSession is configured with, in case there was some parameter that was preventing audio output, to no avail - currently: var options = AVAudioSession.CategoryOptions() options.insert(.allowAirPlay) options.insert(.allowBluetooth) options.insert(.allowBluetoothA2DP) try session.setCategory(.playback, mode: .default, options: options) try? session.setPreferredIOBufferDuration(0.002) // ~96 samples at 44.1kHz try? session.setPrefersNoInterruptionsFromSystemAlerts(true) try? session.setPrefersInterruptionOnRouteDisconnect(false) try session.setActive(true, options: [.notifyOthersOnDeactivation]) All diagnostics within the app show the player operating correctly - files are played and flushed; AVAudioPlayerNodeCompletionCallbacks are called when they should be. But the output is not audible in the vehicle. I would much prefer to ship this app without full-blown CarPlay integration, but with working audio when connected via CarPlay, and work on full CarPlay integration for the next release. Is there some secret handshake I am just missing to make this work?
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116
Mar ’25
save audio file in iOS 18 instead of iOS 12
I'm able to get text to speech to audio file using the following code for iOS 12 iPhone 8 to create a car file: audioFile = try AVAudioFile( forWriting: saveToURL, settings: pcmBuffer.format.settings, commonFormat: .pcmFormatInt16, interleaved: false) where pcmBuffer.format.settings is: [AVAudioFileTypeKey: kAudioFileMP3Type, AVSampleRateKey: 48000, AVEncoderBitRateKey: 128000, AVNumberOfChannelsKey: 2, AVFormatIDKey: kAudioFormatLinearPCM] However, this code does not work when I run the app in iOS 18 on iPhone 13 Pro Max. The audio file is created, but it doesn't sound right. It has a lot of static and it seems the speech is very low pitch. Can anyone give me a hint or an answer?
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105
Mar ’25
Memory Leak in AVAudioPlayer in Simulator only
I have a memory leak, when using AVAudioPlayer. I managed to narrow down the issue into a very simple app, which code I paste in at the end. The memory leak start immediately when I start playing sound, but only in the emylator. On the real iPhone there is no memory leak. The memory leak on the Simulator looks like this: import SwiftUI import AVFoundation struct ContentView_Audio: View { var sound: AVAudioPlayer? init() { guard let path = Bundle.main.path(forResource: "cd201", ofType: "mp3") else { return } let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: path) do { try AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().setCategory(.playback, mode: .default, options: [.mixWithOthers]) } catch { return } do { try AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().setActive(true) } catch { return } do { sound = try AVAudioPlayer(contentsOf: url) } catch { return } } var body: some View { HStack { Button { playSound() } label: { ZStack { Circle() .fill(.mint.opacity(0.3)) .frame(width: 44, height: 44) .shadow(radius: 8) Image(systemName: "play.fill") .resizable() .frame(width: 20, height: 20) } } .padding() Button { stopSound() } label: { ZStack { Circle() .fill(.mint.opacity(0.3)) .frame(width: 44, height: 44) .shadow(radius: 8) Image(systemName: "stop.fill") .resizable() .frame(width: 20, height: 20) } } .padding() } } private func playSound() { guard sound != nil else { return } sound?.volume = 1 // sound?.numberOfLoops = -1 sound?.play() } func stopSound() { sound?.stop() } }
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Mar ’25
Some questions about musickit
We are developing an apple music app on phone, the developed web works fine on chrome, but when i load it on webivew on my phone, i can't play the first song, We doubt that the drm init, key exchange, session creation was on the music.play() function, while we trigger the play, the drm or session was not ok for play a real song, so it got an error so we may wanna know: what about the realative process of drm, key, session, etc in the play() function? are there some state detect function to show weather the drm is ok?
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111
Mar ’25
How to match music with shazamkit for Android ?
Hi all, i can successfully match music using shazamkit on Apple using SwiftUI, a simple app that let user to load an audio file and exctracts the relative match, while i am unable to match music using shamzamkit on Android. I am trying to make the same simple app but i cannot match music as i get MATCH_ATTEMPT_FAILED every time i try to. I don't know what i am doing wrong but the shazam part in the kotlin Android code is in this method : suspend fun processAudioFileInBackground( filePath: String, developerTokenProvider: DeveloperTokenProvider ) = withContext(Dispatchers.IO) { val bufferSize = 1024 * 1024 val audioFile = FileInputStream(filePath) val byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(bufferSize) byteBuffer.order(ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN) var bytesRead: Int while (audioFile.read(byteBuffer.array()).also { bytesRead = it } != -1) { val signatureGenerator = (ShazamKit.createSignatureGenerator(AudioSampleRateInHz.SAMPLE_RATE_44100) as ShazamKitResult.Success).data signatureGenerator.append(byteBuffer.array(), bytesRead, System.currentTimeMillis()) val signature = signatureGenerator.generateSignature() println("Signature: ${signature.durationInMs}") val catalog = ShazamKit.createShazamCatalog(developerTokenProvider, Locale.ENGLISH) val session = (ShazamKit.createSession(catalog) as ShazamKitResult.Success).data val matchResult = session.match(signature) println("MatchResult : $matchResult") setMatchResult(matchResult) byteBuffer.clear() } audioFile.close() } I noticed that changing Locale in catalog creation results in different result as i get NoMatch without exception. Can you please help me with this?
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81
Apr ’25
AVPlayerItem. externalMetadata not available
According to the documentation (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avplayeritem/externalmetadata), AVPlayerItem should have an externalMetadata property. However it does not appear to be visible to my app. When I try, I get: Value of type 'AVPlayerItem' has no member 'externalMetadata' Documentation states iOS 12.2+; I am building with a minimum deployment target of iOS 18. Code snippet: import Foundation import AVFoundation /// ... in function ... // create metadata as described in https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/110338 var title = AVMutableMetadataItem() title.identifier = .commonIdentifierAlbumName title.value = "My Title" as NSString? title.extendedLanguageTag = "und" var playerItem = await AVPlayerItem(asset: composition) playerItem.externalMetadata = [ title ]
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72
Apr ’25
Where is the License Agreement for Android version of ShazamKit?
I have integrated the ShazamKit SDK into my iOS app and would like to implement the same functionality in my Android app. My question is: Can I use the Android version of the ShazamKit SDK for commercial purposes? After extensive research, I could not find any official information regarding the license of the Android version of the ShazamKit SDK. Could you please provide a formal license statement?
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104
Apr ’25
Can a Location-Based Audio AR Experience Run in the Background on iOS?
Hi everyone! I’ve developed a location-based Audio AR app in Unity with FMOD & Resonance Audio and AirPods Pro Head-Tracking to create a ubiquitous augmented soundscape experience. Think of it as an audio version of Pokémon Go, but with a more precise location requirement to ensure spatial audio is placed correctly. I want this experience to run in the background on iOS, but from what I’ve gathered, it seems Unity doesn’t support this well. So, I’m considering developing a Swift version instead. Since this is primarily for research purposes, privacy concerns are not a major issue in my case. However, I’ve come across some potential challenges: Real-time precise location updates – Can iOS provide fully instantaneous, high-accuracy location updates in the background? Continuous real-time data processing – Can an app continuously process spatial audio, head-tracking, and location data while running in the background? I’m not sure if newer iOS versions have improved in these areas or if there are workarounds to achieve this. Would this kind of experience be feasible to run in the background on iOS? Any insights or pointers would be greatly appreciated! I’m very new to iOS development, so apologies if this is a basic question. Thanks in advance!
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86
Apr ’25
Creating an initial Now Playing state of paused - impossible?
I am working on an app which plays audio - https://youtu.be/VbAfUk_eYl0?si=nJg5ayy2faWE78-g - and one of the features is, on restart, if you had paused playback of a file at the time the app was previously shut down (or were playing one at the time of shutdown), the paused state and position in the file is restored exactly as it was, on restart. The functionality works. However, it seems impossible to get the "now playing" information in iOS into the right state to reflect that via the MediaPlayer API. On restart, handlers are attached to the play/pause/togglePlayPause actions on MPRemoteCommandCenter.shared(), and the map of media info is updated on MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().nowPlayingInfo. What happens is that iOS's media view shows the audio as playing and offers a pause button - even though the play action is enabled and the pause action is disabled. Once playback has been initiated (my workaround is to have the pause action toggle the play state, since otherwise you wouldn't be able to initiate playback from controls in a car without initiating it once from a device first). I've created a simplified white-noise-player demo to illustrate the problem - simply build and deploy it, and then start the app, lock your device and look at the playback controls on the lock screen. It will show a pause button - same behavior I've described. https://github.com/timboudreau/ios-play-pause-demo I've tried a few things to narrow down the source of the issue - for example, thinking that not MPNowPlayingInfoPropertyPlaybackProgress and MPMediaItemPropertyPlaybackDuration might be the culprit (since the system interpolates elapsed time and it's recommended to update those properties infrequently) on startup might do the trick, but the result is the same, just without a duration or progress shown. What governs this behavior, and is there some way to explicitly tell the media player API your current state is paused?
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116
Apr ’25
AirPlay v1 is broken in iOS 18.4?
After upgrading to iOS 18.4, I'm no longer able to establish an AirPlay v1 connection to an audio system. The symptom is that the AirPlay route picker just spins when trying to connect to an audio system. It eventually gives up. I tested this on an iPhone 14, connecting to a HomePod, AirPort express, AppleTV and a Wiim Pro. If I try connecting with AirPlay v2, ex: using Apple Music, the connection succeeds and audio can be played. I'm the developer of an app that plays audio over AirPlay while also recording. My app has to use AirPlay v1 because AvAudioSession doesn't allow the policy .longFormAudio when the category is .playAndRecord. This issue is a real pain as it means my app is suddenly broken for many thousands of users. Is anyone else seeing this issue? Any suggestions for a workaround?
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348
Apr ’25
Notification interruptions
My app Balletrax is a music player for people to use while they teach ballet. Used to be you could silence notifications during use, but now the customer seems to have to know how to use Focus mode, remember to turn it on and off, and have to check the notifications one does and doesn't want to use. Is there no way to silence all notifications when the app is in use?
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61
Apr ’25
Track changes in the browser tab's audibility property.
Hi! I am writing a browser extension that allows you to control the playback of media content on a music service website. Unfortunately Safari does not support tracking changes to the audible property in an event tabs.onUpdated. Is there an alternative to this event? I'm looking for a way to track when the automatic inference engine interrupts playback on a music service website. That you.
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71
Apr ’25
Users experiencing frequent media services reset interruptions
I work on an iOS app that records video and audio. We've been getting reports for a while from users who are experiencing their video recordings being cut off. After investigating, I found that many users are receiving the AVAudioSessionMediaServicesWereResetNotification (.mediaServicesWereResetNotification) notification while recording. It's associated with the AVFoundationErrorDomain[-11819] error, which seems to indicate that the system audio daemon crashed. We have a handler registered to end the recording, show the user a prompt, and restart our AV sessions. However, from our logs this looks to be happening to hundreds of users every day and it's not an ideal user experience, so I would like to figure out why this is happening and if it's due to something that we're doing wrong. The debug menu option to trigger the audio session reset is not of much use, because it can't be triggered unless you leave the app and go to system settings. So our app can't be recording video when the debug reset is triggered. So far I haven't found a way to reproduced the issue locally, but I can see that it's happening to users from logs. I've found some posts online from developers experiencing similar issues, but none of them seem to directly address our issue. The system error doesn't include a userInfo dictionary, and as far as I can tell it's a system daemon crash so any logs would need to be captured from the OS. Is there any way that I could get more information about what may be causing this error that I may have missed?
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83
Apr ’25
AVSpeechUtterance stutters in CarPlay when connected to a BT headset
We are currently working on a CarPlay navigation app and so far everything is working well except for speaking turn notifications. Our TTS implementation works fine on the phone and works fine on CarPlay if the voice is spoken over the speaker in the car. If users connect a BT headset to the car and listen through that headset, then the voice commands are chopped up / stutter. Why would users use BT headset? Well, we are working on a motorcycle app, and there are no speakers usually on a motorcycle. It sounds like the BT channel is opened and closed repeatedly for every character / word spoken. This happens on different CarPlay devices and different Bluetooth headsets, we have reports from multiple users that they find this behavior annoying and that other apps work fine. Is this a known issue? Are there possible workaround?
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67
Apr ’25
CheckError.swift:CheckError(_:):211:kAudioUnitErr_InvalidParameter (CheckError.swift:CheckError(_:):211)
I'm getting this error when I launch my application on the iPhone 14 Pro via Xcode. Everything builds OK. I"m using the audio kit plugin and Sound Pipe Audiokit. The error starts as soon as I start the app and will carry on repeatedly. I have background processing turned on as I'd like the sounds to play when the phone is locked via the headphones. I can't find anything online about this error. None of my catches are printing anything in the logs either. So I don't know if this is just something that pops up repeatedly or whether there is something fundamentally wrong. private func setupAudioSession() { do { let session = AVAudioSession.sharedInstance() try session.setCategory(.playback, mode: .default, options: [.mixWithOthers]) try session.setActive(true, options: .notifyOthersOnDeactivation) } catch { errorMessage = "Failed to set up audio session: (error.localizedDescription)" print(errorMessage ?? "") } } // MARK: - Background Task Handling private func setupBackgroundTaskHandling() { // Handle app entering background notificationObservers.append( NotificationCenter.default.addObserver( forName: UIApplication.didEnterBackgroundNotification, object: nil, queue: .main, using: { [weak self] _ in // Safely unwrap self guard let self = self else { return } self.handleBackgroundTransition() } ) ) I'm not sure if this is the code causing the issue. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. This is my first app I'm working on .
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150
Apr ’25
How to disable the built-in speakers and microphone on a Mac
I need to implement a solution through an API or custom driver to completely block out the built-in speakers and microphone of Mac, because I need other apps to use specified external devices as audio input and output. Is there a way to achieve this requirement? What I mean is that even in system preferences, it should not be possible to choose the built-in microphone and speakers; only my external device can be used.
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83
Apr ’25
Issue with Audio Sample Rate Conversion in Video Calls
Hey everyone, I'm encountering an issue with audio sample rate conversion that I'm hoping someone can help with. Here's the breakdown: Issue Description: I've installed a tap on an input device to convert audio to an optimal sample rate. There's a converter node added on top of this setup. The problem arises when joining Zoom or FaceTime calls—the converter gets deallocated from memory, causing the program to crash. Symptoms: The converter node is being deallocated during video calls. The program crashes entirely when this happens. Traditional methods of monitoring sample rate changes (tracking nominal or actual sample rates) aren't working as expected. The Big Challenge: I can't figure out how to properly monitor sample rate changes. Listeners set up to track these changes don't trigger when the device joins a Zoom or FaceTime call. Please, if anyone has experience with this or knows a solution, I'd really appreciate your help. Thanks in advance! ⁠
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65
Apr ’25
AVAudioSession automatically sets the tablet audio volume to 50% when recording audio.
Environment→ ・Device: iPad 10th generation ・OS:**iOS18.3.2 I'm using AVAudioSession to record sound in my application. But I recently came to realize that when the app starts a recording session on a tablet, OS automatically sets the tablet volume to 50% and when after recording ends, it doesn't change back to the previous volume level before starting the recording. So I would like to know whether this is an OS default behavior or a bug? If it's a default behavior, I much appreciate if I can get a link to the documentation.
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100
Apr ’25
Application tones start when I get incoming call or message
I've got a problem with my app where I'm testing it on my own phone. I'm using audio kit to generate tones as part of the app. Everything seems to work fine. Sounds start, Stop, etc. They play when the app is closed and when the phone is locked, so background is working. However, I'm seeing an issue where, even when STOP is pressed and the application exited, if I get a notification such as a text message, the base tone for the app starts to play. If I then open the app, check the Start/Stop button - it says start so that. hasnt' been activated. If I click Start, then a 2nd tone starts. This one stops with the Stop button. However the original tone that was set off by an incoming message carries on playing. Until I go to the Open Apps View on the phone and slide the application upwards. For the life of me, I can't figure out whats happening here.
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Apr ’25