PlaySound: A Better Way to Play Wav Files in C#

The other day, I was whipping up a fun utility which played some Wav files. I was giving this to people whose desktop was Windows Server 2008 so using the Windows Media Player COM object wasn’t an option and SoundPlayer didn’t seem to work with any of the Wav files I had for some reason.

Back in my C++ days, I used to do this all the time with winmm.dll’s PlaySound (and have a piece of freeware which uses this to a great extent).

Well, once again, as a C# programmer, I am saved by PInvoke!

public static class Wav
{
    [DllImport("winmm.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern bool PlaySound(string pszSound, UIntPtr hmod, uint fdwSound);

    [Flags]
    public enum SoundFlags
    {
        /// <summary>play synchronously (default)</summary>
        SND_SYNC = 0×0000,
        /// <summary>play asynchronously</summary>
        SND_ASYNC = 0×0001,
        /// <summary>silence (!default) if sound not found</summary>
        SND_NODEFAULT = 0×0002,
        /// <summary>pszSound points to a memory file</summary>
        SND_MEMORY = 0×0004,
        /// <summary>loop the sound until next sndPlaySound</summary>
        SND_LOOP = 0×0008,
        /// <summary>don’t stop any currently playing sound</summary>
        SND_NOSTOP = 0×0010,
        /// <summary>Stop Playing Wave</summary>
        SND_PURGE = 0×40,
        /// <summary>don’t wait if the driver is busy</summary>
        SND_NOWAIT = 0×00002000,
        /// <summary>name is a registry alias</summary>
        SND_ALIAS = 0×00010000,
        /// <summary>alias is a predefined id</summary>
        SND_ALIAS_ID = 0×00110000,
        /// <summary>name is file name</summary>
        SND_FILENAME = 0×00020000,
        /// <summary>name is resource name or atom</summary>
        SND_RESOURCE = 0×00040004
    }

    public static void Play(string strFileName)
    {
        PlaySound(strFileName, UIntPtr.Zero, 
           (uint)(SoundFlags.SND_FILENAME | SoundFlags.SND_ASYNC));
    }
}

Example:

FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(sFile);
Wav.Play(fi.FullName);