Vista core audio apis for playing mp3s

Im having a lot of trouble finding any useful short concise examples how to load and play mp3s the "correct" way.

I was using allegro with this stupid allegromp3 library and it could play 90% of mp3s so I tried some short simple MCIplaysound code (or whatever its called) on one of the mp3s that allegromp3 couldn't play and it played it fine. I then proceeded to completely butcher all of my allegmp3 code replacing it with MCI stuff.

Turns out MCI wants to play about 30% of mp3s.

Thanks for any help