W13: Playing sounds in Windows Phone 7 applications

In this short tutorial I will show how to play sounds in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight applications. You will be surprised that for playing sounds in Silverlight application you will need to add a XNA Framework reference to your project.

1. Adding reference

First of all you need to add XNA Framework reference to your project. To play sounds in Silverlight applications we are going to use Microsoft.XNA.Framework library.

2. Adding namespaces

Next you need to add two XNA Framework references to your code. You need to add it to a class which is going to be used for playing sounds.

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio;

3. Creating a method

Finally, we need to created a method for playing sounds within a class. I have used the following code:

private void PlaySound(string path)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(path))
    {
        using (var stream = TitleContainer.OpenStream(path))
        {
            if (stream != null)
            {
                var effect = SoundEffect.FromStream(stream);
                FrameworkDispatcher.Update();
                effect.Play();
            }
        }
    }
}

4. Using method

I have used the following code to test my SoundController class:

SoundController sc = new SoundController();
sc.PlaySound(@"Sounds\show.wav");