Playing a custom sound

Copyright © 2000 Ernesto De Spirito

If you want to play the basic system sounds, call MessageBeep with the appropriate parameter. Call MessageBeep(-1); if you want to make the speaker beep.

To play a WAV sound, you can use a TMediaPlayer object, but if you want something fast, the easiest way is calling the API function sndPlaySound (declared in the mmsystem unit). For example:

uses MMSystem;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  sndPlaySound('C:\Windows\Media\Tada.wav',
    SND_NODEFAULT Or SND_ASYNC Or SND_LOOP);
end;

procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  sndPlaySound(nil, 0); // Stops the sound
end;

If you intend to play a sound more or less often, maybe you should consider loading the file in memory and playing it from there:

uses MMSystem;

var
  tada: string;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  sndPlaySound(Pointer(tada), SND_MEMORY
    Or SND_NODEFAULT Or SND_ASYNC);
end;

initialization
  tada := LoadFile('C:\Windows\Media\Tada.wav');

finalization
  tada := ''; // Releases the memory taken by the string
end.

You can embed one or more wave files in your executable and play them from there. First, you need to create a resource (.RES) file. To do this, create a .RC file, for example named sounds.rc:

tada wave c:\windows\media\tada.wav
chimes wave c:\windows\media\chimes.wav

Then you need to compile it with the resource compiler (BRCC32.EXE in Delphi\Bin directory) and you will have a file named sounds.res that you can load in your project with the $R directive. To play the sound directly from the executable call PlaySound (instead of sndPlaySound) with the SND_RESOURCE flag:

uses MMSystem;

{$R sounds.res}

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  PlaySound('chimes', hInstance, SND_RESOURCE or SND_SYNC);
  PlaySound('tada', hInstance, SND_RESOURCE or SND_ASYNC);
end;

Again, if you are going to play a sound more or less often, you should consider loading the resource in memory and playing it from there:

uses Windows, MMSystem;

{$R sounds.res}

var
  tada: Pointer;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  sndPlaySound(tada, SND_MEMORY
    or SND_NODEFAULT or SND_ASYNC);
end;

initialization
  // Here we use some castings to avoid using another variable
  tada := Pointer(FindResource(hInstance, 'tada', 'wave'));
  if tada <> nil then begin
    tada := Pointer(LoadResource(hInstance, HRSRC(tada)));
    if tada <> nil then tada := LockResource(HGLOBAL(tada));
  end;
end.