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c#.netmidi

Best way to play MIDI sounds using C#

I'm trying to rebuild an old metronome application that was originally written using MFC in C++ to be written in .NET using C#. One of the issues I'm running into is playing the midi files that are used to represent the metronome "clicks".

I've found a few articles online about playing MIDI in .NET, but most of them seem to rely on custom libraries that someone has cobbled together and made available. I'm not averse to using these, but I'd rather understand for myself how this is being done, since it seems like it should be a mostly trivial exercise.

So, am I missing something? Or is it just difficult to use MIDI inside of a .NET application?

Solution

  • I think you'll need to p/invoke out to the windows api to be able to play midi files from .net.

    This codeproject article does a good job on explaining how to do this: vb.net article to play midi files

    To rewrite this is c# you'd need the following import statement for mciSendString:

    [DllImport("winmm.dll")] 
static extern Int32 mciSendString(String command, StringBuilder buffer, 
                                  Int32 bufferSize, IntPtr hwndCallback);

    Hope this helps - good luck!