Can DirectSound play mp3s?

My reason for asking is that i want to develop a program that can (fairly) easily assign several instances of a sound player to different soundcards that are installed.

Or even, in the case of 4-speaker soundcards, send 1 sound to the front speakers and a diferent sound to the rear speakers simultaneoulsy.

I understand directX supports this, but its no use to me unless it plays, or can be "persuaded" to play mp3s.

..and I thought I`d ask here rather than downloading 100+MB of SDK!

Thanks