AudioPreview for Explorer

AudioPreview for Explorer is a native Windows Explorer extension for browsing audio samples faster.

It adds waveform thumbnails and a preview pane with playback, metadata, and a larger waveform, without opening a DAW or media player.

Features

• Waveform thumbnails in Windows Explorer.
• Preview pane with file name, codec, duration, sample rate, bit depth, channels, and frame count.
• Play/stop button inside the preview pane, with audio conversion on demand.
• Background preview loading with cancellation when selection changes.
• Optional persistent waveform cache, bounded to 512 entries and 64 MiB.
• Optional Space key playback.
• Optional auto-play when a file is selected.
• Per-user installer. No administrator rights required.

Current Status

This is an early Windows build focused on stable Explorer integration.

Current stable target:

• WAV / WAVE files
• PCM 8/16/24/32-bit and IEEE float32 WAV, including supported WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE files
• waveform thumbnails
• preview pane rendering
• basic audio playback

The codebase is being kept format-neutral so standard formats such as AIFF, FLAC, MP3, OGG/Opus, AAC/M4A, and CAF can be added later without renaming the product again.

Install

1. Download the latest package from Releases.
2. Extract the zip file.
3. Run AudioPreviewInstallerGui.exe.
4. Open Windows Explorer and enable the preview pane.

The installer writes only per-user registry entries under HKCU and installs files under:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\AudioPreviewForExplorer

Command line install is also available:

.\AudioPreviewInstaller.exe install --audio on --autoplay off --space-to-play on --restart-explorer

See docs/installer.md for all installer options.

Build From Source

Requirements:

• Windows 10 or 11
• Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with C++
• CMake 3.26 or newer
• vcpkg

Build and test:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\bootstrap-dev.ps1
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\full-build.ps1 -Configuration Release

Create an installer package:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\package-installer.ps1 -Configuration Release

Development smoke test:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\verify-cli-render.ps1

Useful Links

• Releases
• Issues
• Installer guide
• Architecture notes
• Build workflow

Troubleshooting

If Explorer does not update immediately, restart Explorer or sign out and back in.

If a build cannot overwrite AudioPreviewShellExtension.dll, Explorer or prevhost.exe is still using it. Close Explorer windows or run:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\rebuild-register-dev.ps1 -IncludePreviewHandler

If thumbnails do not appear, check that the file extension is registered and clear Explorer's thumbnail cache.

License

AudioPreview for Explorer is released under the MIT License.

Dependencies keep their own licenses.

Preview limits and validation

File and stream previews share the same WAV validation and decoder. Unsupported encodings, inconsistent headers, truncated chunks and excessive resource requests produce an unavailable preview instead of being decoded.

Stream input and buffered playback are limited to 256 MiB; the converted PCM16 output has the same limit. Playback is prepared when requested (or when auto-play is enabled). File-based waveform analysis uses bounded buffers and supports cancellation. At most two preview jobs decode simultaneously.

The optional waveform cache lives under %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\AudioPreviewForExplorer\Waveforms. Entries are invalidated by canonical source path, size, modification time, resolution and cache version. Cache failures never prevent decoding.

The CI runs decoder, cache, COM preview and isolated installer regression tests in Debug and Release. See the test plan for the remaining manual Explorer checks.