JAJ.Packages.MiniAudioEx 1.4.2

MiniAudioExNET

A .NET wrapper for MiniAudioEx. MiniAudioEx is a a modified version of MiniAudio, see this repository. The goal of MiniAudioExNET is to make it easy to add audio playback to .NET applications. I've tried several libraries in the past and none of them could offer all of the things I was looking for:

• Easy to set up and interact with.
• Spatial audio.
• Cross platform.
• A permissive license.

This library ticks all these boxes. There are some (in my opinion) minor things missing such as more audio format decoders, but at least 3 widely used formats are supported which is sufficient for my needs. If you would like to have support for more formats, then please make your request here.

Features

• Playback of various audio formats such as WAV/MP3/FLAC.
• Stream audio from disk or from memory.
• Callbacks for effects processing and generating audio.
• Spatial properties like doppler effect, pitching, distance attenuation and panning.

Platforms

MiniAudio was designed to work on every major platform, however I do not have a Mac so I can not build a library for Mac OS. As a result only Windows and Linux libraries are currently available.

Installation

dotnet add package JAJ.Packages.MiniAudioEx --version 1.4.2

General gotchas

• Reuse audio clips. If you have loaded an AudioClip from memory, then the library allocates memory that the garbage collector doesn't free. All memory is freed after calling MiniAudioEx.Deinitialize. It is perfectly fine to reuse audio clips across multiple audio sources, so you don't have to load multiple clips with the same sound. A good strategy is to store your audio clips in an array or a list for the lifetime of your application.
• Call MiniAudioEx.Update from your main thread loop. The only reason this method exists is because the End callback of an audio source originates from an audio thread, and we want to move this notification to the main thread which requires polling. The advantage this brings is that you can safely call API functions from within the End callback. An example use of the End callback is scheduling the next clip to be played.
• The Process and Read event run on a separate thread as well. You should not call any MiniAudioEx API functions from these callbacks.
• When using the Process and Read events in netstandard 2.0, it is important to know that the size/length of the buffer you receive in the callbacks might not necessarily be the size of the actual data. Since netstandard 2.0 does not have the Span<T> type, a workaround has been applied that tries to be efficient with memory allocations for these buffers. To get the actual size (or number of elements) of the data you simply multiply the number of frames with the number of channels that the callback gives you. If you write more data than is available, the excess data is simply ignored.

Example 1 (Playing from file)

using System;
using System.Threading;
using MiniAudioExNET;

namespace MiniAudioExExample
{
    class Program
    {
        static readonly uint SAMPLE_RATE = 44100;
        static readonly uint CHANNELS = 2;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.CancelKeyPress += OnCancelKeyPress;

            MiniAudioEx.Initialize(SAMPLE_RATE, CHANNELS);
            
            AudioSource source = new AudioSource();

            AudioClip clip = new AudioClip("some_audio.mp3", true);
            source.Play(clip);
            
            while(true)
            {
                MiniAudioEx.Update();
                Thread.Sleep(10);
            }
        }

        static void OnCancelKeyPress(object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)
        {
            MiniAudioEx.Deinitialize();
        }
    }
}

Example 2 (Procedural audio)

using System;
using System.Threading;
using MiniAudioExNET;

namespace MiniAudioExExample
{
    class Program
    {
        static readonly uint SAMPLE_RATE = 44100;
        static readonly uint CHANNELS = 2;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.CancelKeyPress += OnCancelKeyPress;

            MiniAudioEx.Initialize(SAMPLE_RATE, CHANNELS);
            
            AudioSource source = new AudioSource();

            AudioClip clip = new AudioClip();
            source.Loop = true;
            source.Play();
            
            while(true)
            {
                MiniAudioEx.Update();
                Thread.Sleep(10);
            }
        }

        static void OnCancelKeyPress(object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)
        {
            MiniAudioEx.Deinitialize();
        }

        static long timeCounter = 0;

        static void OnAudioRead(Span<float> framesOut, ulong frameCount, int channels)
        {
            float sample = 0.0f;
            float frequency = 440.0f;

            for(int i = 0; i < framesOut.Length; i+=channels)
            {
                sample = (float)Math.Sin(2 * Math.PI * frequency * timeCounter / SAMPLE_RATE);
                framesOut[i] = sample;
                if(channels == 2)
                    framesOut[i+1] = sample;
                timeCounter++;
            }
        }
    }
}

Example 3 (Spatial audio)

using System;
using System.Threading;
using MiniAudioExNET;

namespace MiniAudioExExample
{
    class Program
    {
        static readonly uint SAMPLE_RATE = 44100;
        static readonly uint CHANNELS = 2;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.CancelKeyPress += OnCancelKeyPress;

            MiniAudioEx.Initialize(SAMPLE_RATE, CHANNELS);

            AudioListener listener = new AudioListener();
            listener.Position = new Vector3f(0, 0, 0);
            
            AudioSource source = new AudioSource();

            AudioClip clip = new AudioClip("some_audio.mp3", true);
            source.Loop = true;
            source.Spatial = true;
            source.Position = new Vector3f(10, 0, 0);
            source.Play(clip);
            
            while(true)
            {
                MiniAudioEx.Update();
                Thread.Sleep(10);
            }
        }

        private static void OnCancelKeyPress(object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)
        {
            MiniAudioEx.Deinitialize();
        }
    }
}