Playing Multiple Simultaneous Sounds in WPF
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WPF’s MediaElement makes simple media playback pretty straightforward, but moving beyond the simple scenarios can sometimes raise surprising challenges. For example, I recently saw someone tripped up by the MediaElement when attempting to play several sounds concurrently.
As you’ll see, one solution would have been to use MediaPlayer instead of MediaElement. The difference between these WPF classes is fairly straightforward. MediaPlayer is the class that knows how to play media files – both video and audio. MediaElement is a wrapper around MediaPlayer that provides a simple way to connect it into a visual tree (i.e. a user interface), which in turn lets us hook it into things like the animation system or event triggers.
(Note: do not be misled by the class name. Although WPF and Windows Media Player depend on the same infrastructure for media decoding, the MediaPlayer class is not a wrapper around the Windows Media Player control. While they share codecs, the path by which decoded video gets onto the screen in WPF is significantly different from Windows Media Player.)
How would that get you into trouble when using MediaElement? If it’s a wrapper around MediaPlayer, surely you could use a MediaElement any place a MediaPlayer would work? In fact it’s not always that simple. To see why, we’ll start with a simple example.
