SKAudioNode play sound once

Question

I can't seem to find much information about SKAudioNode. How do i play a sound only once? I do not want to repeat the sound.

What i am trying to accomplish is to play a short laser sound each time a bullet spawns, in spritekit.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, what @KnightOfDragon says is not correct (but I do not have enough reputation to comment).

SKAudioNode has been introduced in iOS 9 and is meant as a replacement for SKAction.playSoundFileNamed(...) as it is much more powerful (You can add it as a child to a SpriteKit SKNode and if the attribute positional is set to true, 3D audio mixing is added automatically).

In order to play a sound once with SKAudioNode use the following code:

if #available(iOS 9, *) {
    let pling = SKAudioNode(fileNamed: "pling.wav")
    // this is important (or else the scene starts to play the sound in 
    // an infinite loop right after adding the node to the scene).
    pling.autoplayLooped = false
    someNode.addChild(pling)
    someNode.runAction(SKAction.sequence([
        SKAction.waitForDuration(0.5),
        SKAction.runBlock {
            // this will start playing the pling once.
            pling.runAction(SKAction.play())
        }
    ])
}
else {
    // do it the old way
}

Update

Have a look here, how to use Actions on audio nodes: SKAction->Audio-Stuff. The documentation says:

Use SKAction playSoundFileNamed:waitForCompletion: only for short incidentals. Use AVAudioPlayer for long running background music.

This does not mean, that a SKAudioNode should not be used for one-time audio. With playSoundFileNamed you cannot change the volume or pause/stop playback and so on.

Answer 2

if you are trying to do sound effects, you use SKAction.playSoundFileNamed(...) on the sprite that is creating the effect. SKAudioNode is more for having music playing in your game

Example:

//we have ship as an SKSpriteNode

//lets fire laser

ship.runAction(SKAction.playSoundFileNamed("pewpewpew.caf",waitForCompletion:false));