Question

How do I play the ‘New Mail’ system sound in C#? This is also called the ‘Notify’ sound.

In Win32, that would be something like

sndPlaySound('Notify', (SND_ALIAS or SND_ASYNC)); 

So how do you do that in .Net? I know that you can do

System.Media.SystemSounds.Asterisk.Play(); 

But there’s a very limited set of five sounds there – not including whatever the the user has set as the new mail sound.

I can find out which .wav file is being played when I get new mail and play that file, but that won’t update when the user’s sound scheme is changed.

---

What I eventually did:

Instead of playing a system sound, I embedded a wav file into the application as a resource, and played it with System.Media.SoundPlayer

Answer 1

One option is to just PInvoke directly into the sndSound API. Here is the PInvoke definition for that method

public partial class NativeMethods {      /// Return Type: BOOL->int     ///pszSound: LPCWSTR->WCHAR*     ///fuSound: UINT->unsigned int     [System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImportAttribute('winmm.dll', EntryPoint='sndPlaySoundW')]     [return: System.Runtime.InteropServices.MarshalAsAttribute(System.Runtime.InteropServices.UnmanagedType.Bool)] public static extern  bool sndPlaySoundW([System.Runtime.InteropServices.InAttribute()] [System.Runtime.InteropServices.MarshalAsAttribute(System.Runtime.InteropServices.UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string pszSound, uint fuSound) ;      /// SND_APPLICATION -> 0x0080     public const int SND_APPLICATION = 128;      /// SND_ALIAS_START -> 0     public const int SND_ALIAS_START = 0;      /// SND_RESOURCE -> 0x00040004L     public const int SND_RESOURCE = 262148;      /// SND_FILENAME -> 0x00020000L     public const int SND_FILENAME = 131072;      /// SND_ALIAS_ID -> 0x00110000L     public const int SND_ALIAS_ID = 1114112;      /// SND_NOWAIT -> 0x00002000L     public const int SND_NOWAIT = 8192;      /// SND_NOSTOP -> 0x0010     public const int SND_NOSTOP = 16;      /// SND_MEMORY -> 0x0004     public const int SND_MEMORY = 4;      /// SND_PURGE -> 0x0040     public const int SND_PURGE = 64;      /// SND_ASYNC -> 0x0001     public const int SND_ASYNC = 1;      /// SND_ALIAS -> 0x00010000L     public const int SND_ALIAS = 65536;      /// SND_SYNC -> 0x0000     public const int SND_SYNC = 0;      /// SND_LOOP -> 0x0008     public const int SND_LOOP = 8;      /// SND_NODEFAULT -> 0x0002     public const int SND_NODEFAULT = 2; }