Retrieving files from directory that contains large amount of files

I have directory that contains nearly 14,000,000 audio samples in *.wav format.

All plain storage, no subdirectories.

I want to loop through the files, but when I use DirectoryInfo.GetFiles() on that folder the whole application freezes for minutes!

Can this be done another way? Perhaps read 1000, process them, then take next 1000 and so on?

Have you tried EnumerateFiles method of DirectoryInfo class?

As MSDN Says

The EnumerateFiles and GetFiles methods differ as follows: When you use EnumerateFiles, you can start enumerating the collection of FileInfo objects before the whole collection is returned; when you use GetFiles, you must wait for the whole array of FileInfo objects to be returned before you can access the array. Therefore, when you are working with many files and directories, EnumerateFiles can be more efficient.

In .NET 4.0, Directory.EnumerateFiles(...) is IEnumerable<string> (rather than the string[] of Directory.GetFiles(...)), so it can stream entries rather than buffer them all; i.e.

foreach(var file in Directory.EnumerateFiles(path)) {
    // ...
}