Hello,
Is there an easy way to load, play and control an mp3 file from cocoa? Tried googling it, but, as all things apple, i get messy results and have no idea where to start. As i understand, there's and NSSound, but it has lots of limitations and then there's CoreAudio, but it's very difficult. So can someone point me in a right direction with this? Thanks.
I've written a framework in C++ that might help: http://github.com/sbooth/SFBAudioEngine
It supports multiple audio formats and has a fairly benign API and comes with a Cocoa sample.
If you're not interested in third-party frameworks, your bet would probably be to use an AudioQueue to take care of the playback. To do this, you'd probably use AudioFile to decode the MP3 and AudioQueue for the playback. Apple has an example at http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/AudioQueueTools/Introduction/Intro.html
Besides NSSound, you could consider QTMovieView. It sounds odd, but you can have a hidden QTMovieView in your window and use it to play an MP3.
Use NSSound.
You didn't specify what you mean by “lots of limitations”, so I don't know why this won't work for you. Note that it has a lot fewer limitations since Leopard; you can now play to any device, for example.