Implementing a audio visualizer in WPF

Question

I wish to implement a audio visualizer widget (similar to what Winamp has) in WPF. How would I approach this problem?

Answer 1

These two articles may be of use to you:

http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/3dhittesting.htm http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/datavisualizationwpf.htm

They're two articles in a series of 3D visualization using WPF. They're a bit targeted on intro WPF usage. Here are a few more:

http://blog.wpfwonderland.com/2009/01/30/data-visualization-toolkit-for-silverlight-descry/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79445/beats-per-minute-from-real-time-audio-input

In general, you'll want to do a bit of realtime analysis on the audio stream. Beat detection is an easy one - provide some sort of pulsing action that lines up with the beat, intensity increasing with volume, and so on.

Here's another fantastic article: http://knol.google.com/k/music-visualization-techniques#

And another similar question from StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/153712/creating-music-visualizer

Answer 2

If you don't want to spend too long implementing the whole solution around this, I'd recommend you check out NAudio. It has audio capture and playback, along with a good amount of visualisation stuff OOTB.