Original Release: Jan/27/2006
Latest Update: July/15/2010

What is vbMP3Decoder?

Well, as its name suggests, it's an MP3 decoder written in Visual Basic.
The original Visual Basic 6 code is a port from Krister Lagerström's C version of the decoder and it was made by Murphy McCauley from http://www.constantthought.com/

Murphy's original VB6 code worked perfectly and it was able to convert an MP3 file into a WAV file. I then modified the code so that instead of writing the PCM data to a file, it would write it to a DirectSound buffer. Unfortunately, VB6's code was extremely slow -- the CPU resources quickly raised to 100% and the decoder wasn't able to play a single MP3 file without skipping.
Then I decided to port the code to VisualBasic.NET 2005 and see if I could take advantage of the new array handling routines, among other things. After playing a bit with the code I have been to reduce the CPU consumption to less than 15%.
Later on I rewrote a lot of the code to take advantage of the new features in recent versions of the .NET, making it simpler, cleaner and even faster.

What can I use this for?

To learn...
The speed and quality of the decoder are not optimal for a production environment, so I'd suggest you use this code to learn and of course, to admire how VB and the whole .NET framework have evolved!