Simplest way to play mp3 from Visual C++

winapi mp3 directshow audio mci
Mr. Boy picture Mr. Boy · Jan 12, 2010 · Viewed 17.9k times · Source

A few years back, I wrote some util library around DShow/DSound to let me play MP3s in a Windows C++ application. Is that still the normal way to do it in a C++/MFC app, or is that an area of DirectX that has been subsumed into the general Windows APIs?

The motivation is simply we use the standard Windows PlaySound method for WAVs, and would like to be able to play MP3s using a similarly simple API, either provided by Windows or something we write to wrap more complex functionality.

EDIT: this is for a large, commercial, closed-source project. And we only want to play things simply, paying a lot for a library won't fly.

Answer

Gregory Pakosz picture Gregory Pakosz · Jan 12, 2010

You can either use DirectShow but it's not part of DirectX anymore or rely on a third-party library like Bass, FMod, mpg123 or even libwmp3.

If you don't want to use DirectShow anymore (but why change if your existing code keeps working?), you can use MCI:

mciSendString("open la_chenille.mp3 type mpegvideo alias song1", NULL, 0, 0); 
mciSendString("play song1", NULL, 0, 0);
mciSendString("close song1", NULL, 0, 0);

Related questions

Is it possible to "decompile" a Windows .exe? Or at least view the Assembly?

A friend of mine downloaded some malware from Facebook, and I'm curious to see what it does without infecting myself. I know that you can't really decompile an .exe, but can I at least view it in Assembly or attach …

Read More
How to provide user name and password when connecting to a network share

When connecting to a network share for which the current user (in my case, a network enabled service user) has no rights, name and password have to be provided. I know how to do this with Win32 functions (the WNet* …

Read More
What exactly are DLL files, and how do they work?

How exactly do DLL files work? There seems to be an awful lot of them, but I don't know what they are or how they work. So, what's the deal with them?

Read More