Question

I’m making an app for Mac OS X using Xcode, and I want it to play a alert sound when something happens.

What is the simplest code for playing a sound in Objective-C/Cocoa? Note that my sound file is an .aif.

Also, where do I put the sound file inside my project?

Thank you.

Answer 1

To play audio on the Mac, you can either use NSSound for basic activities, or the more robust CoreAudio framework for more complicated tasks.

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If you were to use NSSound to achieve this goal, your code would look something like this:

NSString *resourcePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"replace-with-file-name" ofType:@"aif"];
NSSound *sound = [[NSSound alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:resourcePath byReference:YES];
// Do something with sound, like [sound play] and release.

OR

NSSound *sound = [NSSound soundNamed:@"replace-with-file-name-without-the-extension"];
// Do something with sound, like [sound play], but don't release (it's autoreleased).

If you were to use the second snippet, you would have to ensure that the sound file’s extension is aiff and not just aif, since +soundNamed: looks for very specific file extensions; I don’t think aif is on that list.

Using CoreAudio is more complicated, so if you just want to play it and mess around with very simple settings, just use NSSound