How do you play an MP3 in Visual Basic.NET without delay?

I'm working on a game that plays MP3s at various points usi开发者_开发技巧ng the Windows Media Player component and it takes a long time to load and play MP3s. Would anyone know how to decrease the load time? I've considered multi-threading but I'm not sure how I would do that or if that's even the proper direction.

I'm not sure if there's a way to decrease load time necessarily but if you load it in advance so it's loaded before you need to play it, you won't have to wait.

If that's not a solution, a smaller (more compressed) file will load faster if you're willing to trade sound quality for loading speed.

does visual basic.net use asynchronous file io? if it does it may be worth looking at ways to load synchronously, it will cause your program to wait while the file loads, but should be much quicker than it happening as a background task