Raise wave file volume with NAudio

Question

I am an audio noob

I am looking to embed audio in an html page by passing the data as a string such as < Audio src="data:audio/wav;base64,AA....." /> doing that works, but I need to raise the volume. I tried working with NAudio but it seems like it does some conversion and it will no longer play. This is the code I use to raise the volume:

public string ConvertToString(Stream audioStream)
{
audioStream.Seek(0,SeekOrigin.Begin);
byte[] bytes = new byte[audioStream.Length];
audioStream.Read(bytes,0,(int)audioStream.Length);
audioStream.Seek(0,SeekOrigin.Begin);
return Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);
}

var fReader = new WaveFileReader(strm);
var chan32 = new WaveChannel32(fReader,50.0F,0F);
var ouputString = "data:audio/wav;base64," + ConvertToString(chan32);

but when I put outputString into an audio tag it fails to play. What type of transformation does NAudio do, and how can I get it ton give me the audio stream in such a way that I can serialize it and the browser will be able to play it? Or for another suggestion: if NAudio to heavyweight for something as simple as raising the volume what's a better option for me?

Answer 1

I'm no expert in embedding WAV files in web pages (and to be honest it doesn't seem like a good idea - WAV is one of the most inefficient ways of delivering sound to a web page), but I'd expect that the entier WAV file, including headers needs to be encoded. You are just writing out the sample data. So with NAudio you'd need to use a WaveFileWriter writing into a MemoryStream or a temporary file to create a volume adjusted WAV file that can be written to your page.

There are two additional problems with your code. One is that you have gone to 32 bit floating point, making the WAV file format even more inefficent (doubling the size of the original file). You need to use the Wave32To16Stream to go back to 16 bit before creating the WAV file. The second is that you are multiplying each sample by 50. This will almost certainly horribly distort the signal. Clipping can very easily occur when amplifying a WAV file, and it depends on how much headroom there is in the original recording. Often dynamic range compression is a better option than simply increasing the volume.