Just came here to say that. The fact that core audio is a great performing API means even less performance critical stuff still gets the benefits of it even if

Just came here to say that. The fact that core audio is a great performing API means even less performance critical stuff still gets the benefits of it even if the easy to use abstractions like AVAudioPlayer give up some flexibility and performance vs the native API. While abstraction can make things more flexible, I would argue that the main purpose is ease of use and hiding implementation details.