The NAudio Documentation Wiki
NAudio FAQ
What is NAudio?
NAudio is an open source audio API for .NET written in C# by Mark Heath, with contributions from many other developers. It is intended to provide a comprehensive set of useful utility classes from which you can construct your own audio application.
Why NAudio?
NAudio was created because the Framework Class Library that shipped with .NET 1.0 had no support for playing audio. The System.Media namespace introduced in .NET 2.0 provided a small amount of support, and the MediaElement in WPF and Silverlight took that
a bit further. The vision behind NAudio is to provide a comprehensive set of audio related classes allowing easy development of utilities that play or record audio, or manipulate audio files in some way.
Can I Use NAudio in my Project?
NAudio is licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) which means that you can use it in whatever project you like including commercial projects. Of course we would love it if you share any bug-fixes or enhancements you made to the original NAudio
project files.
Is .NET Performance Good Enough for Audio?
While .NET cannot compete with unmanaged languages for very low latency audio work, it still performs better than many people would expect. On a fairly modest PC, you can quite easily mix multiple WAV files together, including pass them through various effects
and codecs, play back glitch free with a latency of around 50ms.
How can I get help?
There are three main ways to get help. If you have a specific question concerning how to use NAudio, then I recommend that you ask on
StackOverflow and
tag your question with naudio. This gives you the best chance of getting a quick answer. You can also ask a question on the
NAudio discussion forums here on CodePlex. I attempt to answer all questions, but since this is a spare time project, occasionally I get behind. Finally, I am occasionally able to offer paid support for situations
where you need quick advice, bugfixes or new features. Use the contact feature of the Codeplex website to get in touch with
Mark Heath if you wish to pursue this option.
How do I submit a patch?
I welcome contributions to NAudio and have accepted many patches, but if you want your code to be included, please familiarise yourself with the following guidelines:
- Your submission must be your own work, and able to be released under the MS-PL license.
- You will need to make sure your code conforms to the layout and naming conventions used elsewhere in NAudio.
- Remember that there are many existing users of NAudio. A patch that changes the public interface is not likely to be accepted.
- Try to write "clean code" - avoid long functions and long classes. Try to add a new featue by creating a new class rather than putting loads of extra code inside an existing one.
- I don't usually accept contributions I can't test, so please write unit tests (using NUnit) if at all possible. If not, give a clear explanation of how your feature can be unit tested and provide test data if appropriate. Tell me what you did to test it
yourself, including what operating systems and soundcards you used.
- If you are adding a new feature, please consider writing a short tutorial on how to use it.
- Unless your patch is a small bugfix, I will code review it and give you feedback. You will need to be willing to make the recommended changes before it can be integrated into the main code.
- The easiest way to provide a patch is to create your own fork on Mercurial and issue a pull request. See
this video if you are new to Mercurial.
- Please also bear in mind that when you add a feature to NAudio, that feature will generate future support requests and bug reports. Are you willing to stick around on the forums and help out people using it?
How do I...?
The best way to learn how to use NAudio is to download the source code and look at the two demo applications - NAudioDemo and NAudioWpfDemo. These demonstrate several of the key capabilities of the NAudio framework. They also have the advantage of being
kept up to date, whilst some of the tutorials you will find on the internet refer to old versions of NAudio.
Getting Started with NAudio – Downloading and Compiling
- Download a copy of the NAudio source code (or a pre-compiled version but the newest available code is available in source form first).
http://naudio.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets
- The default project is set to the NAudio class library. Class Library’s don’t have anything to look at when you press F5. If this is your first time with NAudio, set the start-up project as
NAudioDemo and then hit F5. The NAudioDemo project shows the base functionality you can utilise through your own project.
- In the BIN directory for the built solution, you can find a copy of the NAudio library for using and referencing in your own project. Make sure that you grab a copy of the NAudio.XML file as well if your copying it over to your own projects directory, that
way you will have the intellisense documentation for use in Visual Studio when working with the NAudio API.
Additional Tutorials from OpenSebJ's blog (n.b. these are for NAudio 1.3):
http://stackoverflow.com/