I’ve changed direction from Rails into iOS programming now… And ran into a big frustration point.

The app I’m working on needs to record and play back audio. So into AVFoundation I go!

The API annoys me. There are a few methods on AVAudioPlayer which can return false in case of error - but there’s no way to tell what the error is. So you have to jerk around experimenting for a while until you figure it out.

Gee. Thanks, Apple.

In my particular case, the play method was returning false; this seems to be because I had not set the audio session category correctly. I’ve yet to find somewhere in the Apple API documentation where it talks about the consequences of having your AVAudioSession set up incorrectly.