C# Audio with SoundPlayer - Is that really all there is to it?

Question

I'm attempting to teach myself audio programming in C# through online tutorials. I'm using wave files (*.wav) with SoundPlayer.

What confuses me is this: why do the tutorials bother reading in and chopping up a wave file if we're just going to blindly feed it into SoundPlayer anyway ?

I feel like I'm missing a gigantic conspiracy. Is the trouble just that SoundPlayer is too simple, and I need to take more advanced control ??

Thank you in advance!

FYI - The tutorials I'm using are:

• http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/7906/A-simple-C-Wave-editor-part-1-Background-and-analy

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dawate/archive/2009/06/24/intro-to-audio-programming-part-3-synthesizing-simple-wave-audio-using-c.aspx

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with SoundPlayer or c#, but usually you read audio files in parts to avoid exhausting memory. It also allows you to start playback faster, since the first part of the file will be available in much less time than the entire file.