Best way to play MIDI sounds using C#

Question

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 o

Answer 1

midi-dot-net got me up and running in minutes - lightweight and right-sized for my home project. It's also available on GitHub. (Not to be confused with the previously mentioned MIDI.NET, which also looks promising, I just never got around to it.)

Of course NAudio (also mentioned above) has tons of capability, but like the original poster I just wanted to play some notes and quickly read and understand the source code.

Answer 2

System.Media.SoundPlayer is a good, simple way of playing WAV files. WAV files have some advantages over MIDI, one of them being that you can control precisely what each instrument sounds like (rather than relying on the computer's built-in synthesizer).

Answer 3

A new player emerges:

https://github.com/atsushieno/managed-midi

https://www.nuget.org/packages/managed-midi/

Not much in the way of documentation, but one focus of this library is cross platform support.

Answer 4

You can use the media player:

using WMPLib;
//...
WindowsMediaPlayer wmp = new WindowsMediaPlayer();
wmp.URL = Path.Combine(Application.StartupPath ,"Resources/mymidi1.mid");
wmp.controls.play();

Answer 5

I can't claim to know much about it, but I don't think it's that straightforward - Carl Franklin of DotNetRocks fame has done a fair bit with it - have you seen his DNRTV?

Answer 6

I'm working on a C# MIDI application at the moment, and the others are right - you need to use p/invoke for this. I'm rolling my own as that seemed more appropriate for the application (I only need a small subset of MIDI functionality), but for your purposes the C# MIDI Toolkit might be a better fit. It is at least the best .NET MIDI library I found, and I searched extensively before starting the project.