Playing MP3s reliably in a VB app

Okay, I'm going certifiably nuts. I need some feedback from people who've done it. I'm trying to write an application that, in the course of doing what it does, needs to play MP3 files (it's not a Winamp clone, it's a specialty program that will come shipped with various sounds in MP3 format to save space).

Anyway, I didn't want to hook into Windows Media Player like so many programmers do because I thought that my program might or might not work based on how well the end user's PC was configured. So I decided to download and use Ingenuware's ImpulseMP3, which seems to have small bugs and problems, but on the average worked fine on my system. The idea was that no matter what, you would always get the ocx and dll when installing, and theoretically, it would be shipping with its own working MP3 player subsystem. When the app was distributed, though, random audio files wouldn't play on random machines, and between that and the little problems just made me get a bad feeling about Ingenuware's component.

So I'm back to square one, and may have to rebuild the app from the ground up with different MP3 support. I have a few questions:

* How have you implemented MP3 support in your applications?

* Are there any good tutorials you could point me to that would teach me how to add Windows Media (or whatever) support to my app?

* What exactly does the end user need on his/her machine to run an app that relies on Media Player? Are there places on Microsoft's site to download the stuff if they don't have it, and if so, where are those places?

* Will I be able to a.) display time elapsed and/or time remaining to my end users during playback; and b.) skip backward/forward in a file using Windows Media?

* Should I just really cut the crap, learn C, and write my own bulletproof MP3 decoder? :-)

I await your always-helpful responses.

-Mark

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Mark D. Scudder
(www.markscudder.com)