How to Play a Short Sound in iPhone Code

Today I am going to turn my iPhone into a Ray Gun by having it play a short laser sound. You probably have seen the many gun, laser and farting apps available on the Apple App Store. Most of these apps simply play a short sound along with some fancy graphics.

Here is how you can play a short sound:

Here is the a summary of the steps I took in the video:

Create a View Based iPhone Application

First, create a view based iPhone application in XCode and add a button to your view that will play the sound. If you need a refresher on how to use Interface Builder to hook up controls check out my article on adding a slider control.

Add the Audio Toolbox framework

Drag in the Audio Toolbox framework into your frameworks group in XCode. Here is a video on how to quickly add frameworks in XCode if you need it: Quick Tip: Adding Frameworks Painlessly in XCode. Remember that the framework will be all one word with the .framework extension, AudioToolbox.framework.

Add a short wav file to your project

I used the website Joe’s Original Wave Files for this demo and found a nice laser sound to use. You can also buy the rights to use sounds in apps that you want to sell from websites like iStockPhoto.

Use Audio Services to play the sound

To keep things simple I put all the code that you need to play the sound in an IBAction called “shoot”.

-(IBAction) shoot{
	//Get the filename of the sound file:
	NSString *path = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@",
					  [[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath],
					  @"/jad0007a.wav"];

	//declare a system sound id
	SystemSoundID soundID;

	//Get a URL for the sound file
	NSURL *filePath = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path isDirectory:NO];

	//Use audio sevices to create the sound
	AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID((CFURLRef)filePath, &soundID);

	//Use audio services to play the sound
	AudioServicesPlaySystemSound(soundID);
}

That is it – pretty simple way to add some cool effects to your app.

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Tagged as: how to make iphone apps, iPhone development, iPhone Programing, iPhone Programming