Contents tagged with Sound

  • First entry / Fun with Media Player SDK

    11 Comments

    This entry may surprise some people I know that are reading the main feed every day - I didn't tell them I would start a blog... For everybody else some quick info about me: I'm 34 years old, started programming in 1983 on a TRS-80 Color Computer and got my first PC in 1989. I live in Bonn, Germany, working as a software developer for a local company. In my spare time I enjoy writing tools and macros, and - in many iterations over the last years, using different languages/technologies - a kind of DJ'ing software for sports events like basketball games. Currently I'm doing a complete rewrite in C#, using the windows media player 9 SDK.

    So far, my experiences using the media player object, its properties, methods and events have been very good. But yesterday I ran into something rather strange.

    Say you open a sound file like this:

    objPlayer.URL=@"D:\MySound.wav";

    and now you want to know the duration

    double dDuration=objPlayer.currentMedia.duration;

    but dDuration is 0. If you play the sound file, currentMedia.duration contains the correct value. But you want the duration before starting playback. Ok, next try:

    IWMPMedia objMedia = objPlayer.newMedia(filename);<br>objPlayer.currentMedia=objMedia<br>double dDuration=objPlayer.currentMedia.duration;<br>

    Again, dDuration is 0. Now try this:

    IWMPMedia objMedia = objPlayer.newMedia(filename);<br>double dDummy=objMedia.duration;<br>objPlayer.currentMedia=objMedia<br>double dDuration=objPlayer.currentMedia.duration;<br>

    And... dDuration contains the correct value!

    Took me some time to figure out that one...