Capture a Microphone Audio Stream Using .NET Framework

.net audio input stream microphone
Josh Stodola picture Josh Stodola · Feb 4, 2009 · Viewed 44.7k times · Source

I need to capture the input stream from a microphone in my application, which is written in VB.NET. I need to be able to stream this data to a file or over HTTP and possibly encode it using LAME MP3. Can anybody help me get started with this?

Thank you!

Answer

Mark Heath picture Mark Heath · Feb 4, 2009

If you want a .NET solution, you can check out NAudio which is an open source audio library. Look at the WaveInStream class (or WaveIn in the latest code). This will let you open a microphone, and receive events containing the latest captured bytes. This would be quite easy then to pass on to a stream.

As for encoding MP3 using LAME, one approach I have seen used is to pass the audio to lame.exe via stdin and read the mp3 from stdout. This is I think easier than getting hold of a LAME DLL and writing interop wrappers for it.

Update: I have created an example project that uses NAudio to record from the microphone, and LAME to save as MP3 at http://voicerecorder.codeplex.com. See my article at Coding4Fun here.

Related questions

How to play a sound in C#, .NET

I have a Windows application written in C#/.NET. How can I play a specific sound when a button is clicked?

Read More
Play audio from a stream using C#

Is there a way in C# to play audio (for example, MP3) direcly from a System.IO.Stream that for instance was returend from a WebRequest without saving the data temporarily to the disk? Solution with NAudio With the help …

Read More
How can I make the computer beep in C#?

How do I make the computer's internal speaker beep in C# without external speakers?

Read More