// do something here

In my SpriteKit game, all of a sudden the background music stopped playing, all I heard was silence no matter what the volume levels were in either the app settings or via the hardware buttons.

I am not sure why this happened, but I was able to figure out how to get it working again. The key was adding an AVAudioSession call before the existing AVAudioPlayer code. Here is some sample code of what I did:

AVAudioSession *session = [AVAudioSession sharedInstance];
[session setCategory:AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayback error:nil];
 
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"your_sound_file.caf"];
_player = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url error:nil];
[_player setDelegate:self];
[_player prepareToPlay];
[_player play];

BTW, Happy Birthday to Brutus Beefcake. (I couldn’t really find any other good birthdays, deaths, or events in the Wikipedia page for today.)