Closest equivalent to UIImage for audio files in Swift

I need to download and process audio from an api that returns an url.

I can download the audio as data using the session object: }

@objc func download(surl: NSString, completion : @escaping (NSData) -> Void ) {
    guard let url = URL(string: String(surl)) else { return }     
    let sessionConfig = URLSessionConfiguration.default
    let session = URLSession(configuration: sessionConfig, delegate: nil, delegateQueue: nil)
    let task = session.dataTask(with: url) { data, response, error in
        if let data = data, error == nil {
            let nsdata = NSData(data: data)
            DispatchQueue.main.async {
                completion(nsdata)//returns the audio as NSData
            }
        } else {
          //fail
        }
    }
    task.resume()
}

With the resulting NSData if it was an image I could do

        if let img = UIImage(data: data as Data) {
           do something with my image
        }

However I'm unclear how best to hold and work with my audio data eg save, move etc.

Can you keep it in the form of anything more precise than Any or NSData? I believe you can play it as an url using avplayer:

let playerItem = AVPlayerItem.init(url: url)
            player = AVPlayer.init(playerItem: playerItem)
            player?.play()   

However, is there a container equivalent to UIImage or do you just deal with audio using urls, NSData Any etc.

Thanks for any suggestions

The rough equivalent of UIImage for audio is AVAsset. It represents "the media" in a form independent of its format.

As a rule, you do not hold audio or video in a Data because they are generally drastically larger than a single image and you will incur significant memory pressure. You can write them to disk and access them via a file URL.

Since holding audio or video as Data is an extremely rare use case, there are few conveniences for it. You would need to manage it yourself as Data and feed it to a AVSampleBufferAudioRenderer.

On Mac, there is also NSSound which supports constructing very small audio clips directly from Data.