A native, Media Foundation-based WMA audio encoder

This is a tutorial that demonstrates how to perform variable bitrate (VBR) audio compression with Media Foundation. As far as I can tell, it is the only complete and functional example available on the internet that supports VBR... believe it or not.

For many years I've been using Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs I own, and since I essentially live in a Windows ecosystem I've had the need to compress audio files using the Windows Media Audio codec.

Originally I used Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder 9 command-line utility to perform this encoding, but eventually that product was discontinued and replaced with Microsoft Expression Encoder. I couldn't figure out how to use Expression Encoder as a command line utility, but the Expression Encoder SDK was freely avaialble so I wrote a small console app in C#. For the next few years it worked pretty well.

Then Expression Encoder was discontinued, so I started searching for yet another replacement for my compression needs. It appeared that Media Foundation was the latest and greatest library available, so I set out to create a new utilty based on Media Foundation.