Play an Audio File from a Console application

To play a file from a console application, we will use AudioFileReader as a simple way of opening our audio file, and WasapiPlayer as the output device. WasapiPlayer is the recommended output device on Windows — it's built with the fluent WasapiPlayerBuilder, and with no configuration at all it opens the default playback device in shared mode.

We simply need to pass the audioFile into the outputDevice with the Init method, and then call Play.

Since Play only means "start playing" and isn't blocking, we can wait in a loop until playback finishes.

Afterwards, we need to Dispose our audioFile and outputDevice, which in this example we do by virtue of putting them inside using blocks.

using NAudio.Wave;

using(var audioFile = new AudioFileReader(audioFilePath))
using(var outputDevice = new WasapiPlayerBuilder().Build())
{
    outputDevice.Init(audioFile);
    outputDevice.Play();
    while (outputDevice.PlaybackState == PlaybackState.Playing)
    {
        Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

WasapiPlayer also implements IAsyncDisposable, so in an async Main you can await using it instead and avoid blocking while the playback thread is joined. See Playing Audio with WasapiPlayer for the full set of builder options (device selection, exclusive mode, latency, low latency and raw mode).

Other output devices

Every output device in NAudio implements IWavePlayer, so the code above works unchanged whichever one you pick — only the line that constructs the device changes:

• WaveOut — the legacy WinMM device (new WaveOut()). Still supported, but has higher latency than WASAPI and no reason to be preferred in new code.
• AsioDevice — for professional low-latency audio interfaces, see Play audio with ASIO.
• AlsaOut (NAudio.Alsa) on Linux, and CoreAudioPlayer (NAudio.MacOS) on macOS.

Choose an output device type compares them in more detail.