title: Simplest way to play mp3 from Visual C++
body: <p>A few years back, I wrote some util library around DShow/DSound to let me play MP3s in a Windows C++ application. Is that still the normal way to do it in a C++/MFC app, or is that an area of DirectX that has been subsumed into the general Windows APIs?</p>
  
  <p>The motivation is simply we use the standard Windows PlaySound method for WAVs, and would like to be able to play MP3s using a similarly simple API, either provided by Windows or something we write to wrap more complex functionality.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: this is for a large, commercial, closed-source project. And we only want to play things simply, paying a lot for a library won't fly.</p>