iPhone: AVAudioPlayer unsupported file type

Question

My app downloads an mp3 from our server and plays it back to the user. The file is 64 kbps (which is well within the acceptable range for iPhone if I understand correctly).

Answer 1

We were dealing with the same issue - we had to write the file to disk first. What I found eventually was that the data we were downloading had extra, blank bytes at the beginning. When reading from disk using initWithContentsOfURL, AVAudioPlayer knew how to deal with this, but when loading from NSData using initWithData, it did not. Trimming those bytes fixed it.

Answer 2

If your product name contains space, you will receive the error.
My project's product name was: Panorama 1453 TR. initWithContentsOfURL method cannot fetch file path. so it was not working. you can put a breakPoint to NSURL *fileURL = . After a step you can see fileURL what data has.
I changed to Panorama1453TR , it did work.

Answer 3

From iOS 7 AVAudioPlayer has new initializer

NSError *error;
[[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithData:soundData fileTypeHint:AVFileTypeMPEGLayer3 error:&error]

The supported UTIs

NSString *const AVFileType3GPP;
NSString *const AVFileType3GPP2;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAIFC;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAIFF;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAMR;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAC3;
NSString *const AVFileTypeMPEGLayer3;
NSString *const AVFileTypeSunAU;
NSString *const AVFileTypeCoreAudioFormat;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAppleM4V;
NSString *const AVFileTypeMPEG4;
NSString *const AVFileTypeAppleM4A;
NSString *const AVFileTypeQuickTimeMovie;
NSString *const AVFileTypeWAVE;

Answer 4

At long last i have found a solution to this problem! Instead of initializing the audio player with the NSData object, I saved the file to the Documents folder, and then initialized the player with the file URL

//download file and play from disk
NSData *audioData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:someURL];
NSString *docDirPath = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *filePath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/%@.mp3", docDirPath , fileName];
[audioData writeToFile:filePath atomically:YES];

NSError *error;
NSURL *fileURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:filePath];
player = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:fileURL error:&error];
if (player == nil) {
    NSLog(@"AudioPlayer did not load properly: %@", [error description]);
} else {
    [player play];
}

When the app is done with the file, it can be deleted. Hope that his helps more than just me!