Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 11. Who Said That?

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Playing media using the MediaElement

• Playing and combining SoundEffects

• Recording audio from the microphone

• Integrating into the media hub

• Tuning the FM radio

Windows Phone is an amazing playback device for both audio and video. Your application can make use of the rich media playback capabilities offered by Silverlight as well as the XNA audio framework for playing polyphonic sound throughout your application.

In this chapter, you will learn how to integrate audio playback into your application and how you can access the microphone audio stream to do your own audio processing. You'll also see how you can leverage cloud-based services to extend the Windows Phone audio capabilities to do text-to-speech and language translation.

MEDIA PLAYBACK

There are two ways to play media within a Windows Phone application. If you want to do simple video or audio playback, you can add a MediaElement to your PhoneApplicationPage and use the Source property to specify the media to play. Alternatively, you can load an audio file into memory using the SoundEffect class and then play the sound on demand.

MediaElement

Let's start with a simple example of using the MediaElement to play back an audio file. Create a new project within Visual Studio using the Windows Phone Application project template and add an audio file (e.g., an mp3 or wav file), making sure that the Build Action property is set to Content and the Copy to Output Directory property is set to Copy ...