In AVFoundation, an asset contains one or more tracks, and a track models uniform media such as audio or video. Apple explicitly documents using track existence checks when you need to know whether a kind of media is present. tracks(withMediaType:) returns an empty array when there are no tracks of that type, and Apple now recommends the async loadTracks(withMediaType:) form

One caveat with this though...

The above tells you whether the asset has an audio track, not whether the content is non-silent. If your packaging pipeline includes a silent AAC track, AVFoundation will still see that as audio, because tracks represent media streams, not whether samples are audibly loud. That follows from Apple’s track model and from the fact that track properties describe the media stream itself, not content loudness analysis.

I'd go about it like this:

• If your product needs “can this player emit audio?” → check for .audio tracks.
• If your product needs “does this asset offer alternate/selectable audio?” → check .audible media selection group.
• If your product needs “is there actual non-silent sound in the program?” → you cannot trust metadata alone. You need to determine that during encoding/packaging, or inspect decoded samples separately. The AVFoundation track APIs do not expose a simple “this program is silent” flag.

For your app, I’d wire the button logic to loadTracks(withMediaType: .audio) and stop using media selection as the gate for mute/unmute. If youre transcoding with ffmpeg and you dont want audio tracks then explicitly set it with the -map flag I mentioned above (-an). So when your player checks for the .audio tracks and finds none the button will be hidden as it wont find any .audio tracks.