Do you need to play a simple sound in
your .NET MAUI application? Well then I've got the solution for you. Check
out this video and you'll learn everything. For Xamarin.Forms you have the Simple
Audio Player. I think that's what it was called and it did exactly what the
name says. It's a very simple audio audio player. It kind of like does the
basics for playing a small sound bite, maybe a song. But it
doesn't integrate into like iOS and Android audio features or media
features. It isn't a fully featured media player inside of your
application. There is other plug ins for that. There is a time and
place for everything. But this is just for playing with those sound bites.
Maybe you're creating a game which has to do pew pew or something like that. Or you want to
have a little audio feedback whenever you tap a button or something inside of
your application. But it wasn't made available for .NET MAUI yet and
the plugin didn't really seem that maintained. And my good
friend Shaun and I had a couple of ideas on how to make this plugin,
maybe even better. So we took some inspiration from their code
and we created the Plugin.Maui.Audio, which is now the new plugin
which allows you to very easily play a little sound bite in
.NET MAUI. Let's go check out how to get started with it. Inside of
Visual Studio 2022. I've created a new .NET MAUI project.
And the first thing I did, of course, is install the NuGet
package. So here in the Solution Explorer, you can right click
on the project and you can say Manage NuGet Packages. Now
I've already installed it so you can browse for Plugin. Maui.Audio. Make sure to check the
include prerelease checkbox at the time of recording at
least because we added a little preview label on it because
we just wanted you to test it out first before we go anywhere. So
whenever you click that, install it on your project and you're
ready to go. You don't need to do any
initialization, you don't need any permissions for this to play a sound. So that makes it
very easy to use. Now you can use it in kind of like two
ways. We've adopted kind of like the Essentials APIs, how they're
doing things. So net me show you the most
complicated thing and then the easy one is much easier. So let's go to our MauiProgram first. Open the project, MauiProgram.cs and you can of course use this with
dependency injection, right? So you can just register this in the
dependency injection containers so we can say Builder.Services.Add and
probably what you want to do is AddSingleton.
Because the way we have this set up is we use an IAudioManager. And with that AudioManager, you can
have multiple players, right? So each sound can have its own
player. And this. IAudioManager. Well, actually, not
the IAudioManager. It has an interface, of course, that you can use, but you
want to have the AudioManager concrete type, and you want to say Current.
Again, this is kind of like following the same pattern that the essentials APIs
are doing. So we have an AudioManager current, and this Audio Manager can
create multiple players. This is what will be responsible for
all the players inside of your application. So we've got that to be able to inject
that inside of our page or our page model, page view model. We
also need to register that in our dependency service,
dependency injection containers. So Services.AddTransient. And we want to say MainPage. Okay, so
now we got that set up, we should be able to
inject our AudioManager inside of our MainPage. So let's do that. Go to
our MainPage.xaml.cs. And here in the MainPage constructor,
I can now say IAudioManager audioManager. Let's give it a
name. And then I'm going to create a field here. It doesn't
exist yet, but I'm just going to type it. this.audioManager = audioManager. So I can use it from
outside of the constructor, right? So that's why I'm doing this. Audio
Manager. Okay, let IntelliSense help me here to create a little read
only field, audioManager. And boom. I got that audio manager set
up. Now with this, I can create those players, right? So
what I also already did is add a little sound bite to my project. So
here in the Solution Explorer under Resources and Raw, you can just
add resources that will be added inside of your
application. So, for instance, little movie clips, audio clips, images that you
want to use, although there's a better place for that. So everything that's
not an image of font, basically whatever you see here. So I put it in that
mysound.wav and that's here. So I'm going to use
that to actually play this here in the application. Now on the
OnCounterCliek, which is in the default template, I'm
going to reuse all the code here and I'm going to say
var player = audioManager.CreatePlayer, right? So you can create multiple
players that you can hang on to. Imagine that you're building a game
with spaceships and you're shooting asteroid, something like
that. So you have the shooting sound, pew, pew. And you have the asteroid
exploding. Don't ask me to create those sounds
for you. You can create a player for each of those, right? And you can
then just say you will have that player and you can say player play
whenever it has to play. So you don't have to create a player each time that
you need to play that sound. So that's basically how you can do
that. If we inspect what we want to do here, this either wants a stream or
a file name. Now, for the file name, it really has
to be in an exact position. So probably what you want to do mostly
is use the stream here, the audio stream. But
that can be very easily done because we have the
Essentials APIs to help you get a stream out of that raw file for the
resources. So we can just say file system, whoops that has
to be a capital... FileSystem, which is the file system
helpers. And we can do OpenAppPackageFileAsync
with which we can just open a file from the
app package. So our application package. And here
you can just specify the file name. So I can just say mysound.wav. And this is mostly done. It needs to
be async. So I'm going to do a wait here and then I
need to make this async, right? So then it all works. Now we
have this player which is going to load my sound. And now I can just say
player. And we have a bunch of APIs here. We
can get the duration from this audio file. We can get the current
position. So if it's playing, we can see it, what position it is, can seek. So
can we actually take that little slider? There's no slider, but take
that virtual slider, put it somewhere else, and then it starts playing from
that position. Right? So can we do that? And if we can, then you can use this
Seek API to actually set it to a position where you wanted to
continue playing from. We can ask like, is it playing? We can do the
balance so that you only hear it left or right whenever it's stereo.
Of course, the current position, duration, I
think I have them all. And we got a couple of methods, of course, for play, for
pause, for seek, for stop. And we can set the volume right. So
that's basically all the things that we can do here. Well, we want to do the
play. I'm only going to show you the basics right now. The rest
should speak for itself, how to use it. So I'm just going to do the play. And
whenever we do this, I can just run this on Windows. It also
supports Android, iOS. You can just run this and your
application should play the little sound. So I'm just doing
this on Windows right now. That will probably build the fastest. And it's
easiest to do with all the audio input right here. So
whenever the app is going to come up, we are going to see the little .NET
bot who is waving. But now whenever we click the button, it's going to
actually play this sound. So whenever I do click here and I'm going to keep my
mouth still here for a moment because this is a prerecorded sound.
Look at my mouth. I'm not speaking. This is a
prerecorded sound. I swear. Just subscribe to my channel whenever
you hear the sound. Okay, thank you. It is a prerecorded sound. You can do
that. Now this is how easy it is to actually
implement it. Now there is a couple of things that are good to know.
Mostly that the AudioManager is a IDisposable. So whenever you're
done with the AudioManager or whatever you're
done with this player, you can say hey, I want to dispose of
this, right? I'm done with this, I don't need it
anymore. It needs to be disposed because else it will keep hanging on to that
stream from the mysound and it can become a memory leak. So it's probably more common that you
will dispose of the players whenever you don't need them anymore. And the
AudioManager, it's a singleton so that's probably going to live
throughout your whole application. And it doesn't matter that much because if you clean
up all the players then the AudioManager should be fairly small, right? So
whenever you're done with the player, dispose of that and
you should be good. Now the other thing that I wanted to show you
is how you could easily play a sound without having to do all the
dependency injection, right? Typically whenever you have a good architecture
building that game or whatever, you want to have it through that dependency
injection. If you don't want to do that and just want to play a simple sound we
can go back to this AudioManager current, right? So we can go here and you can hear directly say
AudioManager.Current.CreatePlayer and all the rest is exactly the same,
right? So you're just going to get that player again, don't forget to
clean it up. But you can access that instance directly and you can just play a sound
that way. So that's basically how easy it is and that is
how you can easily play a sound in .NET MAUI. Now, if you
check out the plugin repository because it is open source
so we accept pull requests, we accept issues, we accept whatever,
go check it out. And we have a little sample app
in there which does a lot of things. It shows you actually how to
show the duration, the progress. With a little timer there you can have
sliders for like seeking throughout the audio clip, throughout the
balance. You can set it to left and right. We
have a little demo for all the features that are in here.
We're thinking about ways to making it actually easier to play those sounds.
So whenever you want to have that little audio feedback on tapping
a button, we're thinking of creating a little XAML extension that will
easily allow you to do that. If you have any ideas, please
open issues or better yet, open those pull requests
because it's a very small project so it should be fairly easy to get
started with contributing and if you don't know how, please ask me because I'm always
happy to help. Let me know down in the comments what
you're going to create with this little audio player. And if you actually like
this video, basically put everything that you want
to tell me in the comments like this video so that it will spread to
more people throughout the wonderful YouTube community and I can grow my
little channel right here. Thank you so much for watching and please check out
this playlist for more .NET MAUI content. Check out this
video for some more recommended content and click this button to see
if you're already subscribed. See you for the next.
