I have been working on the Jukebox project while code for the Enstall project client is being worked on. I had to find a music playing library that would be fairly portable. While C# with mono can easily transport Windows, Linux, and Mac, I could not find a audio library that did that. I wanted to be able to decode mp3 files as well as other compressed audio formats.
One option I had was converting all the audio files to WAV files or OGG, but these files are significantly bigger; along with, going from a lossy format to those would be a waste of resources. After looking at around 6 audio solutions I went with the easiest. To the horrors of many, and the silent screams of some, I detect your OS, then unpack that OS version of VLC. Once unpacked it starts with only a Telnet interface; with this interface, another thread logs in and controls VLC. So I have a standardized communications language, and I don’t have to handling decoding, audio cards, audio channel selecting, ect.
If you have not used this before it is built for a program to control it, there are controls such as “get_playtime”. You get a nice computer readout from that. One downside is that there are slight differences from windows to Mac to Linux, but those are easily accounted for.
If anyone has another easier solution drop it in the comments but for cross compatibility this seems to be working well.