On this page you will learn how to:
 | break long lines of code |
| add sounds to a VB program |
Adding sound to VB programs is not difficult, but a clumsy line must be
included in the General Declarations area first:
Private Declare Function sndPlaySound _
Lib "winmm.dll" Alias "sndPlaySoundA" _
(ByVal lpszSoundName As String, ByVal _
uFlags As Long) As Long This is (and has to be) a single line of code, but it has been wrapped
by putting a space and an underscore character where you want to wrap the line. (Don't put these characters inside a text string i.e. between double
quotes.) Using this trick, very long lines of code can be made easier to read
without horizontal scrolling.
Once you have copied the above line of code into the General Declarations area
of your project, then the code
for playing sound is easy. Assuming you have placed a sound file called 'mysound.wav'
into the same folder that contains your project, you can play it anywhere in any
procedure with the following line:
rc = sndPlaySound(App.Path & "\mysound.wav", 1)
Since your sound file will have a different name, you should replace
the word mysound.wav with the name of your file, without removing the
double quotes or the backslash.
Why are all the above lines rather hard to understand? It's because we are
using VB to control the computer directly with this code, whereas usually
we use VB to control Windows, and let Windows control the computer. So now you
know.
If you would like to try a sound effect right now then
| make a new Standard EXE project and save it immediately (File/Save
Project) into a folder called Sound |
| add a command button called cmd1 |
| copy and paste the function declaration from the top of this page into the
General Declarations area at the top of the code window |
| download this sound by right-clicking
and saving into into the same folder that contains your project |
| copy and paste this code for the command button: |
Private Sub cmd1_Click()
rc = sndPlaySound(App.Path & "\applause.wav", 1)
End Sub
Final notes:
| the computers in the CIV computer labs do not have speakers so if you are
working at school you will need to borrow headphones from Mr. W in order to
hear the sounds. |
| the above techniques work for 'wave' sounds (sound files that have a .wav
extension) but do not necessarily work for other sound formats such as MIDI
(.mid) or .aif files. If you wish to play MIDI sounds then see
the next project, called Video but also covering some audio formats too. |
|
