Playing MP3 Audio Files (And Not Using WMP)

Based on a thread earlier today, and in particular an answer that Cor gave wherein he
pointed to this article, I thought that I'd do some investigation. Many times here the question has come up about playing .mp3 audio files and NOT using the Windows Media Player object. In the article referenced above, he shows how this can be done via DirectX.

I've looked at DirectX before and it seemed ambiguous so I never really dug into it but it turns out to be pretty simple actually! I thought that I'd write this as a step-by-step of what I did so that maybe some of you will find use from it. The whole thing stems around using DirectX and to begin with, you'll need to download and install the SDK for it. If you haven't already,

try this link. Do be aware that it's a large download (about a half gig)! Once that's installed, create a form and add a reference to the class that we need for this. You can do this several ways, but the way I usually do is to right-click on the name in the Solution Explorer, then choose "Add Reference":

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