How can I make my program load music from files?

Question

I'm working with a XNA game and I want my program to load music files from libary/music so I can play that music in the game. It would be great if the mediaplayer class could play a playlist of all the music in library/music.

Answer 1

Generally, in order to play an MP3 in XNA it has to go through the Content Pipeline. If you want to learn how to do it, a quick search turned up this tutorial.

Now, to your question:

Single Song

To play an MP3, you need to pass an instance of a Song to MediaPlayer.Play. As I stated above, you usually get the instance of your song via the Content Pipeline, but I do see it has a FromUri method.

I have never used it before, and it may only work for the Silverlight framework on Windows Phone, but you can give it a try.If I had to guess, I would assume it would work like this. Keep in mind that the file will have to exist. If it doesn't you will get an error. If you are distributing this game, Use the Content Pipeline. It is much better.

Song song = Song.FromUri(new Uri("file:///C:/Users/Joe/Music/FinalCountdown.mp3"));
MediaPlayer.Play(song);

I see there was a question on StackOverflow, and the answer looks like he is on a Windows PC. Maybe that will help get you there.

Playlist

You mention wanting a playlist, well MediaPlayer.Play can also take a SongCollection, and it will just loop through each song.

Answer 2

As a follow up on this other question you can load all the mp3s in a directory into a Song list with:

var songs = Directory.EnumerateFiles(directory, "*.mp3")
            .Select(file => Song.FromUri(file, new Uri(file)))
            .ToList();

You can look in the Music folder by setting directory to the following:

string directory = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyMusic);

There's also a known bug where Song.FromUri will throw an exception when trying to load a file that has spaces in its name. See this answer on stackoverflow for a workaround using reflection to call the internal constructor directly.