Converting MP3 to WAV with NAudio

One of the more common support requests with NAudio is how to convert MP3 files to WAV. Here’s a simple function that will do just that:

public static void Mp3ToWav(string mp3File, string outputFile)
{
    using (Mp3FileReader reader = new Mp3FileReader(mp3File))
    {
        using (WaveStream pcmStream = WaveFormatConversionStream.CreatePcmStream(reader))
        {
            WaveFileWriter.CreateWaveFile(outputFile, pcmStream);
        }
    }
}

… and that’s all there is to it.

Notes:

1. There is no need to wrap pcmStream with a BlockAlignReductionStream since we are not repositioning the MP3 file, just reading it from start to finish.
2. It uses the ACM MP3 decoder that comes with Windows to decompress the MP3 data.
3. To be able to pass the MP3 data to the ACM converter we need to do some parsing of the MP3 file itself (specifically the MP3 frames and ID3 tags). Unfortunately, there are some MP3 files that NAudio cannot parse (notably the sample ones that come with Windows 7). My attempts at tracking down the cause of this problem have so far failed. (the basic issue is that after reading the ID3v2 tag, we don’t end up in the right place in the MP3 file to read a valid MP3Frame – see MP3FileReader.cs). Please let me know if you think you have a solution to this.