Fun with audio

[krisl100]

How can I write a console C++ app that will play an audio file (wav, or mp3)?

[teknomage1]

You need two things - a librabry implementation or spec describing a file format you want to play, and a library for getting sounds out to the speaker hardware. There are also some libraries such as gstreamer that handle the whole thing.

[DJMaze]

fmod is also a cool library http://fmod.org/

[QUantumAnenome]

For quick and easy, winmm.dll has a simple PlaySound() function to do this.
For anything else, FMOD rocks!