The xaudio SDK mentioned above is pretty neat. It could be described as Winamp withought any graphical interface. You start up a copy of the xaudio program inside of your own program and talk to it using a pipe . I actually used a variation of the pipe explained at this link, it was a two-way pipe. This way is pretty intuitive and makes sorting and counting easier.
Images Here are some close-ups of the equipment.
They are fairly high-quality, so they will take a minute to download.