Reputation: 10247

How to play non-PCM file or convert it to PCM on the fly ?

The following code works with some wav files, but with others I get, "InvalidOperationException was unhandled. Message=Sound API only supports playing PCM wave files."

var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.DownloadFile(url, fileName);
var fileSound = new SoundPlayer(fileName);
fileSound.PlaySync();

Is there a way to programmatically check if a wav file is "bad" (not a PCM wave file) and then convert it as necessary?

What is odd is that the code works in the legacy Delphi app - all of the wav files play just fine. Here's the Delphi code:

filename := GetEnvironmentVariable('TEMP')+'\archieAndDingbat.wav';
URLDownloadToFile(nil, PChar(url), PChar(filename), 0, nil);
PlaySound(filename);

I looked at the properties of the two files in Explorer, and I see that there is, indeed, a difference. For the file that does play, its audio format is PCM; the one that won't play is CCITT u-Law.

So...I either need a way to convert from CCITT u-Law to PCM on the fly after downloading these files (they are download from an url and then played locally) OR perhaps a different way of playing these files than PlaySync() ...

Upvotes: 4

Answers (3)

B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven

Reputation: 10247

The way to do it is to use newkie's code at: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/175030/PlaySound-A-Better-Way-to-Play-Wav-Files-in-C?msg=4366037#xx4366037xx

In my case, at least, I had to change all of the lowercase x's to uppercase x's, though, to get it to work.

Upvotes: 0

Arioch 'The

Reputation: 16045

So, do you want to PLAY the file or CONVERT it ? What is the primary goal ? Do you play it as a prove you can convert it, or do you convert it because you don't know how to play not-converted file ? http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal

Your question's title claims "convert" but the body claims "Play"

This answer is about playing files.

You also may try to use FFDShow codecs directly without DirectX intermediate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec and http://libav.org/ and http://ffmpeg.org/ (they recently had a schism)

Googling for "FFDShow dotnet", "libav dotnet", "ffmpeg dotnet" shows a bunch of libraries to use it, such as

There is also BASS library. It is targeted as sound playback during gaming, so it probably has less range of formats and not much for re-coding. Still many music players are built on top of it. Some says it is the most simple API to use. So it worth considering. http://www.un4seen.com/

http://MediaInfo.sf.net is a library (native win32/win64 DLL) allowing to check most multimedia formats content. I don't know if using tis C or C++ APis is easy from C# side.

Upvotes: 1

Francis Lee

Reputation: 975

Look at audiolab library from mitov. It works great

Upvotes: 1

How to play non-PCM file or convert it to PCM on the fly ?

Answers (3)

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