.NET news » Multimedia 
C# Space Invaders using WinForms objects
DirectX.Capture Class Library
Sound activated recorder with spectrogram in C#
A Synchronized Volume Control for your Application
In a forthcoming article I will be describing a DirectSound based Wave Player-Recorder, with some unusual features.
The GUI will include a simple volume control for playback. Since I wanted that control to be synchronized with the system Volume Control utility, I needed to use WinMM.DLL functions and I thought this interim article outlining how those functions are used, and showing in particular how such a control can be synchronized with the system Volume Control, might be of general interest.
Microsoft XNA: Ready for Prime Time?
Webcamera, Multithreading and VFW
Lazy parenting with Microsoft Speech SDK
Fundamentals of Sound: How to Make Music out of Nothing at All
Speak Up: Support Dictation With Text Services Framework
One of my favorite new features in Windows Vista is Windows Speech Recognition, which allows you to operate your computer using only your voice, including dictating text into e-mail messages or other documents. Windows Speech Recognition uses the Text Services Framework (TSF) to insert, select, and correct dictated text. TSF is a scalable framework for the delivery of advanced text input technologies. It provides a standardized method for text services—such as voice recognition, handwriting recognition, spell checkers, and Japanese Input Method Editors—to communicate with applications and text controls. In particular, TSF allows bidirectional communication between applications and text services. This means that text services can read and write to an application’s document and an application can ask a text service to perform actions such as correcting text.
Simple Speech Recognition
One of the coolest features to be introduced with Windows Vista is the new built in speech recognition facility. To be fair, it has been there in previous versions of Windows, but not in the useful form in which it is now available. Best of all, Microsoft provides a managed API with which developers can start digging into this rich technology. For a fuller explanation of the underlying technology, I highly recommend the Microsoft whitepaper. This tutorial will walk the user through building a common text pad application, which we will then trick out with a speech synthesizer and a speech recognizer using the .Net managed API wrapper for SAPI 5.3. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a working application that reads your text back to you, obeys your voice commands, and takes dictation.

