Copyright © 2011-2023 MultiMedia Soft How to use the API in your projects

First of all let us say that if this guide should not be clear to you, feel free to contact our support team for any doubt or curiosity you may have: we usually answer all of our customers questions in less than 24 hours. Note that the purpose of this guide is simply to give a taste of the main features available inside Audio Sound Editor API and may not cover all of the available features.

 

As an integration to this guide, a certain number of examples of use of this component can be found inside the "Samples" folder: if during the setup phase you left the installation directory to its default, you will find them inside "C:\Program Files\Audio Sound Editor API for .NET\Samples".

 

We have already seen in a previous tutorial how to add the API to various development environments like C#, Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ (unmanaged) and Visual Basic 6, how to create a new instance of the component's class and, before starting sound editing management, how to initialize the component.

 

Before starting sound editing management, the component needs to be initialized: for this purpose it's mandatory a call to the InitEditor method; the best place to call this initialization method is usually the container form initialization function: for example, when using Visual C#, it will be the Form_Load function. The main purposes of calling the InitEditor method is to synchronize the component with its container form. When the API is no more needed, usually when the container application is closed, it's recommended invoking the Dispose method that frees all of the allocated resources and closes communication with the underlying drivers.

 

 

 

After the component's initialization we should decide if the sound under editing will be stored in memory or inside a temporary file: this can be done through the GetStoreMode and SetStoreMode methods; it's important to note that the sound under editing will be always stored in uncompressed WAV PCM format so its total size could become an issue when dealing with low-end systems:

 

 

At this point we can load a sound for editing purposes from different sources:

 

 

By default, each of the mentioned loading methods will create a new editing session discarding the existing one: this behaviour can be modified through the SetLoadingMode method which allows loading a new sound without discarding the existing editing session and to perform one of the following operations:

 

 

As a further loading feature, you can limit the range of sound data that will be loaded from the given sound file with a previous call to the SetLoadingRange method, a useful feature if you want to extract a small portion of an existing sound file for editing purposes.

 

Information about the loaded sound file, for example the audio format, can be retrieved through the GetFileType and GetFileInfo methods.

 

Further editing features, applicable to the whole editing session or to a specific range, can be summarized by the following list:

 

 

A certain number of special effects can be applied to the existing editing session through the EffectsMan class:

 

 

All of the mentioned effects are applied through separate editing sessions meaning that, for each of them, there will be a corresponding method to invoke. Through the interaction with our Active DJ Studio component, which supports most of the mentioned effects in real time during playback, you have the possibility to apply a certain amount of settings in a single editing session by invoking the Effects.PlayerSettingsApply method.

 

Basic noise removal is also supported for the following kind of noises:

 

 

See the How to perform noise removal tutorial for further details.

 

During the execution of the editing sessions the container application is notified about current advancement through the CallbackEditPerc delegate set through the CallbackEditPercSet method.

 

During the editing session the DisplayWaveformAnalyzer property, which implements the WaveformAnalyzer class, allows performing a deep analysis and detailed graphical visualization, with zooming and panning capabilities, of the sound's waveform; it can also produce a bitmap (in memory or into a graphic file) of the waveform itself.

 

IMPORTANT: The graphical visualization of the WaveformAnalyzer class on a user interface requires the component to be instanced inside a container form.

 

Contents of the editing session can be exported to an output file through the ExportToFile method. The encoding format used for the output file can be set through the EncodeFormats.FormatToUse property and settings specific for each available sound format can be set through the available sub-properties of the EncodeFormats property: if for example you need to export in MP3 format, you will have to deal with properties and methods available inside the EncodeFormats.MP3 property.

 

Through the SilencePositionsDetect method, the control supports Silence detection, a feature which allows detecting positions of silent portions inside the loaded sound and store them inside a list. The list of detected silent portions can be enumerated at a later time through the SilencePositionsNumGet and SilencePositionsGetRange methods.

Silence detection can be canceled at any time through the SilencePositionsCancelDetect method.

 

Related to the mentioned silenced detection, through the TracksPositionsDetect method the control support audible tracks detection also so, instead of detecting silent portions, in a very similar way it allows detecting and enumerating audible track separated by portions of silence. The list of detected audible tracks can be enumerated at a later time through the TracksPositionsNumGet and TracksPositionsRangeGet methods.

After reviewing enumerated tracks, you may decide that two tracks should be attached together in order to consider them as a single one: this can be done through a call to the TracksPositionsRangeAttachToNext method.

Audible tracks detection detection can be canceled at any time through the TracksPositionsCancelDetect method.

 

Finally, an editing session can be closed and its contents discarded from memory through a call to the CloseSound method.

 

Further capabilities of the component, not directly related to sound editing, are the following:

 

 

Lengthy operations like loading of files, exporting and editing sessions, etc. are performed inside secondary threads that make use of callbacks in order to keep the container application informed about advancement of various sessions: see the How to synchronize the container application with the API tutorial for further details.