Play audio from a dual array

NAudio is one of the options I've heard people mention multiple times (like you). I know this is an open source third party library. You can take a look at this.

Unfortunately, from what I collect, it seems to me that DirectX is coming out and over the years MS has changed its push to a few different things and now it seems that they are pushing people towards using XNA, which is really a complete framework that, when you do projects in XNA, can run on Windows Desktop or Xbox 360 or Windows Phone. For me, Windows Phone is not a big one as it seems like MS is not a big player in the mobile world, but the app that runs on the Xbox appeals to me. But I've seen several improved features in the XNA framework / architecture that are lacking in the regular .NET framework, including video playback and audio playback. I don't know a lot of details other than this, since I haven't gotten into XNA development yet (yet).

Also you can play them directly in .NET using System.Media.SoundPlayer without any third party library.

I found the code below that plays a simple sine wave using it. It generates sound samples and then streams it to MemoryStream

, which is then played by SoundPlayer. The SoundPlayer itself takes a stream formatted in WAV format, which I know can play stereo audio, but I don't need stereo audio, so I haven't learned how to add that to the WAV file format. What I love so much about this is that it doesn't need third party DLLs. If this method is useful to you, then here it is:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;

public static void PlayBeep(UInt16 frequency, int msDuration, UInt16 volume = 16383)
{
    var mStrm = new MemoryStream();
    BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(mStrm);

    const double TAU = 2 * Math.PI;
    int formatChunkSize = 16;
    int headerSize = 8;
    short formatType = 1;
    short tracks = 1;
    int samplesPerSecond = 44100;
    short bitsPerSample = 16;
    short frameSize = (short)(tracks * ((bitsPerSample + 7) / 8));
    int bytesPerSecond = samplesPerSecond * frameSize;
    int waveSize = 4;
    int samples = (int)((decimal)samplesPerSecond * msDuration / 1000);
    int dataChunkSize = samples * frameSize;
    int fileSize = waveSize + headerSize + formatChunkSize + headerSize + dataChunkSize;
    // var encoding = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding();
    writer.Write(0x46464952); // = encoding.GetBytes("RIFF")
    writer.Write(fileSize);
    writer.Write(0x45564157); // = encoding.GetBytes("WAVE")
    writer.Write(0x20746D66); // = encoding.GetBytes("fmt ")
    writer.Write(formatChunkSize);
    writer.Write(formatType);
    writer.Write(tracks);
    writer.Write(samplesPerSecond);
    writer.Write(bytesPerSecond);
    writer.Write(frameSize);
    writer.Write(bitsPerSample);
    writer.Write(0x61746164); // = encoding.GetBytes("data")
    writer.Write(dataChunkSize);
    {
        double theta = frequency * TAU / (double)samplesPerSecond;
        // 'volume' is UInt16 with range 0 thru Uint16.MaxValue ( = 65 535)
        // we need 'amp' to have the range of 0 thru Int16.MaxValue ( = 32 767)
        double amp = volume >> 2; // so we simply set amp = volume / 2
        for (int step = 0; step < samples; step++)
        {
            short s = (short)(amp * Math.Sin(theta * (double)step));
            writer.Write(s);
        }
    }

    mStrm.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
    new System.Media.SoundPlayer(mStrm).Play();
    writer.Close();
    mStrm.Close();
} // public static void PlayBeep(UInt16 frequency, int msDuration, UInt16 volume = 16383)

      

        
        
        
      

    

Of course, if you go with that last option, you will need to figure out how to format stereo audio as WAV and peek into (or ask) it. Happy coding!