AVPlayer “freezes” the app at the start of buffering an audio stream

Question

I am using a subclass of AVQueuePlayer and when I add new AVPlayerItem with a streaming URL the app freezes for about a second or two. By freezing

Answer 1

Gigisommo's answer for Swift 3 including the feedback from the comments:

let asset = AVAsset(url: url)
let keys: [String] = ["playable"]

asset.loadValuesAsynchronously(forKeys: keys) { 

        DispatchQueue.main.async {

            let item = AVPlayerItem(asset: asset)
            self.playerCtrl.player = AVPlayer(playerItem: item)

        }

}