Playing multiple sounds in Windows Phone : Silverlight Feeds

Playing multiple sounds in Windows Phone

by Corrado Cavalli via Corrado's BLogs on 10/3/2010 5:05:04 PM

Sometimes you might need to play multiple sounds at once (games are just one example) and as stated into documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff426928(VS.96).aspx you can have only one MediaElement on a page, so: how do I play multiple sounds at the same time?
If you can afford to use plain 16 bit mono wav files you can use XNA’s SoundEffect class in just a few steps:

Add a project reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework assembly.

Add the wav files to your project using Content as default build action (don’t forget that Resource is a load time performance hit)

Then add following code inside App.xaml constructor:

readonly DispatcherTimer timer = new DispatcherTimer();

 public App()
 {

    this.timer.Tick += (s, e) =>{FrameworkDispatcher.Update();};
    this.timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100);
    this.timer.Start();
    ...
 }

Finally load the sound you wish to play simultaneously using something like:

private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
  SoundEffect effect1 = SoundEffect.FromStream(TitleContainer.OpenStream("b.wav"));
  SoundEffect effect2 = SoundEffect.FromStream(TitleContainer.OpenStream("tada.wav"));
  effect1.Play();
  effect2.Play();
}

and you’re done. Smile