Playing music files.

Does anyone have any information on how to best play a few sound file formats? I want to create a sort of mini-player for my computer, and I don't want to comp out by using something like the windows media player control. Are there some built in windows APIs I can use for playing things like wavs, mp3s, oggs, and midis, and what are the most efficient ways to play those files?

PlaySound api for wav.
Do not know for othre kind of files, though...

ok thanks, anyone else?

Here is an example of DirectShow. It works nicely.

I wrote the module to that DirectShow program ;)

Made it to where it loads movie files as well (mpeg, avi, etc)

I haven't tried it yet for anything other than mp3.
It gets my mark of approval, which means that I recommend it to others.
Also, I want to see if it requires component download. I hesitated with DirectX because i didn't think I had what was necessary. I guess sp2 set me straight.

DirectX is the best when it comes to anything. Graphics, games, sounds, input, music, and networking in real time.

Then there's OpenGL which is a lot of fun to work with. Not sure if you can use OpenAL or OpenIL or anything like those in VB. Those are for stuff other than graphics, such as audio, input, etc.

I would suggest you use FMOD.

Does that include the Dolby Encoder? That would make it worthwhile.

I did an experiment and it seems you have to intialize DirectX8 and all of that to get the videos working. Probably because it's using the backbuffer. Other than that, it's perfect for mp3's :bigyello:

So, does it play videos or not, assuming that you do have DirectX 8 installed?

Yes it does after you intialize DirectX and all of that. If you don't, it won't play at all. ;)

try
http://www.wasm.ru/src/4/ufmod.zip
archive include VB6 example