I am interested in detecting the approximate output level of my sound card in software; what I want to do in the end is to trigger something when a sound is played in otherwise quiet output, but probably the perfect example project from which I could get started would be something like a VU meter, that would just give an indication of the output volume of the sound on the speaker output channel. The sound is coming from another program, which I can't modify or anything, and I just want to be able to detect when it is playing a sound. I'm primarily an electronics guy, not a programmer, and right now I'm doing this job with an external circuit that plugs into the headphone jack, and replacing it with an entirely software solution would be a huge benefit.
I have seen some example programs in other languages, that do something like that for the microphone input, however even if I managed to adapt that to C#, I'm not sure how I would adapt it to work with the speaker output channel, instead of the microphone input, or if that's even possible. Should this be a relatively simple task?
I was frustrated when looking around MSDN and elsewhere about the lack of information I found for accessing the sound card like this. I would greatly appreciate if anyone knows any good resources/tutorials for this kind of thing, and/or has any examples I could look at. Thanks!
