The up to date way to play sounds?

I played about with playing sounds a long time ago, I found Xact (or whatever it was called) a bit over complicated, in fact I couldn’t get it working, and the more simple SoundEffects were ok, but there was very little flexibility.

Before I go balls out blazing into loads of code and testing, what do people use with Monogame these days? Is the simple SoundEffect class good enough for most? Does Xact still work with 3.6?

And, how does Xact work with the pipeline? Is it a completely separate thing, or do you need to implrt stuff to Xact, then put output files into the Pipeline, or, what and how?

I’ve found a couple of articles that “very briefly” explain how to use Xact, but they say to add the output to the actual game project, which goes against the pipeline way of working. And is Content.Load still the way to work with sounds?

As always, I will appreciate all and any helpful links or explanations. Thank you.

And where would I get Xact? I don’t want to install an out of date XNA, which needs VS2010 and a load of old phone developer stuff, which it says are prerequisites.

I’ve never used Xact, but for a while I was using SoundEffectInstances for everything. It requires a bit of overhead to make sure everything works well together, but it’s totally possible. You could also look into Wwise or FMOD, which are popular and powerful sound engines. It’s not super easy to get them to work with Monogame though, so be prepared to put in some work if you go one of those routes.

I’m curious what people generally use as well, though.

Edit: I should say it’s not easy to get Wwise to work with Monogame. I haven’t tried FMOD, but when I was doing research a couple years ago I didn’t find much.