Why?

Why aren’t there any decent audio libraries for .NET? Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that the framework supports some audio features in a very simple way if you want to just play something. However, if you need access to the audio data to manipulate it in whatever way or just want to know the duration, play location, audio levels, etc… why is it so difficult? To add, there are now nearly a handful of audio sub-systems to choose from… Windows Multimedia, Asio, DirectSound and the new audio subsystem included with Windows Vista / Windows 7. It seems that if you want to play in the world of audio, you really have to get your hands very dirty by digging at full depth into API land.

Oh well, guess it’s time to get my hands dirty. ;-)