I have a mp3 file. I have a background sound file like rain sound or some fire sound. I want to play these two files parallel in the app as well as in background. So that it looks like a single music is playing a story with a background. Please provide any guidance to achieve this.
AFAIK there are four ways to play audio in WP: BackgroundAudioPlayer, MediaElement, SoundEffect, Microsoft Media Foundation. As for your question:
BackgroundAudioPlayer - it won't work, as there is only one Instance of BAP on the phone. So to play a different file, you have to change Track's Source, so it won't handle two at the same time.
MediaElement - it's also a bad idea (it won't also run with BAP simultanously), because as MSDN says:
When a MediaElement control plays audio or video content, any background sounds or media already playing are halted. The app launches the playback experience when the user taps the control. Only one MediaElement control can operate at a time.
you can try to play many sounds using SoundEffect (thougt as Documentation says it can be only a wave file), I won't post code here, because there are already many examples: one, two, three
as for Microsoft Media Foundation: Walkthrough, Programming Guide, Supported file formats
Related
I'd like to be able to press a button to play a sound of a button being pressed while music is already playing. SoundPlayer is no help because it stops the music to play the sound.
I have added the sounds to my Resources (WindowsFormsApplication2.Resources.Properties.button) and I don't want to have to type in the file location.
Answer from MerickOWA
You CANNOT play two sounds at once using SoundPlayer.
SoundPlayer is using the native WINAPI PlaySound function to accomplish the task which has no support for playing simultaneous sounds. Creating multiple instances of SoundPlayer won't help.
There are many options most of which involve implementing a lot of the low level API to window's native audio library or DirectSound (note neither are C# and require alot of interop code)
The simplest option would be to depend on windows media player to play the audio for you.
Add a reference to "C:\Windows\System32\wmp.dll"
then use
var player = new WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer();
player.URL = #"..\..\bin\debug\tribal dance.wav";
Note: play starts immediately after setting the URL property
The down side of this approach is your reliance on media player for your application to work properly. On the upside, you can use any file format media player supports.
I have researched a lot on playing sounds for Windows Phone 8 devices and found multiple solutions but they don't quite match my case.
What I need : I'm writing an app (C#+XAML) that uses a file as background sound (must be active while navigating the whole app), and also to be able to play sound effects.
What are the issues :
For background sound I could use the BackgroundAudio Agent, but it doesn't meet my requirements because I want the sound to be played only in the background of my app, and to stop if my app closes or is not active.
For sound effects - I tried MediaElement which is okay, but I couldn't manage to make it somehow play while I am navigating the whole app. Media closes if I leave that page - I guess I could use this for the sound effects trick. Also, there's the SoundEffect which is not quite a good solution since it can play only .wav files... I could use it for sound effects only but not background sound (big sized files).
So, how should I proceed to play background sound (only inside my app) if I choose MediaElement/SoundEffect to play a sound effect in the app. I need a solution that would allow me to play 2 sounds at once (background and sound effect) and the background sound to be played only while the app runs (is active)...
So far I am confused and managed only to solve the sound effects issue.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
The issue you are seeing with your MediaElement is that you are defining it to be part of the application page and it stops playing as soon as it disappears off of the Visual Tree (i.e. after OnNavigatedFrom).
If you define a MediaElement to be "visible" as part of the application frame, audio will keep playing while your app is active (you will need to handle deactivation events, naturally).
If you do this MediaElement should work for your "background audio".
Be aware you can only have one single active MediaElement playing media in your app, however you should be able to use SoundEffect for your sound effects.
Update:
To put your MediaElement in a frame, you will need to create a custom PhoneApplicationFrame class/XAML, add the MediaElement to that XAML, and refer to your custom frame in App.xaml.cs.
// Do not add any additional code to this method
private void InitializePhoneApplication()
{
if (phoneApplicationInitialized)
return;
// Create the frame but don't set it as RootVisual yet; this allows the splash
// screen to remain active until the application is ready to render.
RootFrame = new MyCustomPhoneApplicationFrame();
RootFrame.Navigated += CompleteInitializePhoneApplication;
See this Dzone article for more about Frame/Page in Windows Phone.
In practice, MediaElement is has some gotchas like the visual tree requirement. There are ways to get around it, but they are not optimal. I would suggest scrapping using MediaElement and use XAudio2 instead. It is native so default usage would be in c++, but you can also use SharpDX to access this framework from C#.
The advantage of XAudio2 is that you would not need to worry about sound dropping out when navigating around since it is not dependent on the UI. Another advantage is you could have one SourceVoice for handling your background audio, and other SourceVoices for handling sound effect playback. This all fits well within the model of usage the framework was designed for.
I want to be able to precisely control the timing of .wav files played in my program. I also want to be able to play more than one .wav file at the same time. The SoundPlayer was not good enough because I can't play two sounds at once, and even when I play different sounds consecutively, there is about a 1/8th second delay between each sound, which is unacceptable for what I am doing. I cannot find a way to add a Device using SharpDX.
You have a directsound sample in sharpdx, should get you started.
Also you can have a look at NAudio , which should also fit your needs and be a bit easier to use.
I Want to play a song in the background of my WPF Application, but i prefer not using
MediaElement Because it requires MediaPlayer 10 to run, and i can't have control on whether the user will have it or not.
What are my options?
If you do not want to use MediaElement, you can use NAudio to play an MP3.
There are multiple ways to play a Mp3 File in .Net. Try IrrKlang for example which is free for non-comercial usage.
You could also use the C# port of JavaLayer.
Lately, I've been trying to setup a media center PC. I've played around with all the common media center applications like XBMC, Plex, Boxee, and WMC. But all of them have one issue or another. So I was thinking about writing my own application from scratch.
My problem is I have no experience with developing software that plays media such as videos or music. I'm also not interested in spending a huge amount of time trying to figure this out, considering all the different file formats and codecs out there. I'm really more interested in developing the database and library interface for my application and reusing someone else's control or code for actually playing the media.
One option I was thinking was to just control an existing media player externally. So for example you may browse for a video to play in my application, and then when you hit play it would fire up VideoLAN or some other popular video player.
However, I was wondering if there was an easy way to play video inside a .NET application. I'm looking for something that is capable of playing a wide variety of formats such as MKV files, and DVD ISOs. I'm more experience with WinForms, but was also thinking about using this project as an opportunity to learn WPF.
i've spent many years looking at playing video under wpf.
The short answer
There is no easy way to guarantee to be able to play a variety of formats under wpf ( mkv,dvd etc etc ) or under windows for that matter.
the long answer
If you are looking just to run this at home and not release it, install all the codecs you need and most of the formats will run via mediaelement in wpf.
Getting all the codecs to cooperate can sometimes be frustrating.
Now moving into slightly harder territory.
if you want to play DVD then you need to replace mediaelement with wpfmediakit
http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com/
wpfmediakit gives a base library to get access to the low level directshow functionality.
There is already a code base for playing DVDs based on wpfmediakit.
Now moving onto the very hard territory.
if you want to distribute your application and have users be able to "just watch" most/all media formats means you need to be able to completely control their codecs, which generally means distributing the codecs with your package and building the directshow filter graph in code rather than let windows build it.
The easiest way is to use the existing .Net hooks to Microsoft's standard MediaPlayer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediaplayer.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562851%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
was trying myself a while ago for something to play media in winforms, and found out there is vlc wrappers for .Net, dunno how good they are as i gave up, but you can try
here is one them:
http://vlcdotnet.codeplex.com/
Thanks for all the great answers. But just found out that VLC can actually be controlled through HTTP. So I think I'm just going to use that to point an instance of VLC running with the HTTP interface at whatever file I want to play.