CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netaudio.net-4.0
komorra
komorra

Reputation: 255

Filling and playing audio buffer in C# (.NET 4.0)

Where I can found something suitable (library) for .NET 4.0 (C#) capable for following features: + Reading mp3/wav samples with direct access to samplebuffer of loaded samples? (for example I want to load mp3 sample and programatically add reverb, chorus, and more custom effects implemented by me) + Playing directly audio buffers (arrays of floats) + Saving audio buffers to disk as mp3 or wav

Some time ago i found ASIO for .NET and this only works with .NET 3.5, is there something for .NET 4.0? Thank's a lot for your help.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3069

Answers (1)

Jason Olson
Jason Olson

Reputation: 3696

ASIO for .NET won't help you in the cracking of mp3 or wav files. The most modern API in Windows for doing this is Microsoft Media Foundation. These are all COM APIs though, so you're either going to be doing (perhaps painful) COM interop from .NET or (easier) writing a C++/CLI wrapper. If you go the C++/CLI wrapper, you will need to be aware of performance issues (especially with how critical latency is to audio programming).

I'm skeptical that you will get the audio latency you need when programming in .NET. A good audio driver (like ASIO) will get you down to <3ms of latency. So if you are targetting "live audio", you will need to be generating audio buffers quicker than that (unless you are fine with longer latencies). To put it this way, the "time intervals" that the Windows APIs deal with are in 100 nanosecond intervals :).

You likely don't want to have to crack the files yourself. It becomes tedious as it's not only just mp3 and wav. You also have to be aware of how the wav is formatted as well (to account for different bit rates, number of channels, etc.). Using Media Foundation, it will automatically load the write decoder for you, you just give it the file path. Check out this tutorial that shows opening an existing WAV file and writing a new WAV file. I just recently went down this path for a drum sequencer I'm creating, and it's not very painful at all (if you're familiar with COM programming).

The central component in MF that makes this possible is the MFSourceReader.

If you're wanting to play the audio after you modify it, you can look at the sample "RenderExclusiveEventDriven" in the Windows SDK (under "audio" I believe). That's what I did for the drum sequencer as well. Latency won't be an issue and you're just dealing with byte arrays, so manipulating the raw data becomes very easy. Though at this point, you can probably stick with the ASIO .NET route and just use that to play the raw data you get from MFSourceReader.

I don't think there are .NET wrappers around Media Foundation yet (though if somebody has done that work already, feel free to post here as it would be awesome to know).

Upvotes: 3

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