silverlight audio monitoring

Question

as far as i can tell the only way to play audio on silverlight 3 is using the mediaelement. I'm comparing using flash vs silverlight for a web app which will allow the user to interactively turn on/off multiple tracks from a single audio compositions.

1. how many simultaneous sounds can silverlight play at once? Think flash has a limit of 30.
2. any way to monitor the sound levels (left and right channels) like i can using the flash soundchannel object?

Answer 1

You can also use the MediaStreamSource (with MediaElement), to have finer grained control over your audio or to modify or procedurally create your audio. Sadly though, you need to have an intimate understanding of audio and create your own audio control classes to detect the sound levels. I would search the net for examples of how others are using MediaStreamSource with audio.

I am unaware of limitations with how many audio tracks you can play at a time. I'm not sure if there is an artificial limit or if you are just limited by system resources.

Answer 2

You can use this library which provides you with the raw audio data (PCM). It is a custom MediaStreamSource, as Jeremiah mentioned.

It currently only works with MP3 and stereo channels. You can use the Audio PreProcessor functionality to mute the specific channels if you like.

The demo shows this off in the Pan effect