Talk:DirectSound

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3/Nov/2005 I have preserved the original article I found here below. As it seemed to be mostly lifted directly from Microsoft and addressed to programmers, I am supplying a new article, based on my personal experience programming with DirectSound for many years. - TropicalCoder http://www.magma.ca/~gtaylor

Was: "DirectSound is a library of objects for recording and playing sounds with very low latency, and for allowing your game a high level of control over the sound pipeline. It also includes a system for 3D sounds (playing the sound in such a way that it seems to come from a specific direction) and a system for applying effects to sounds (like 'echo' and 'gargle')."

Contents 1 Fit into Category:Music software plugin architectures? 2 Downloading DirectSound 3 DirectSound plays *all* audio? 4 Xaudio in a separate article.

[edit] Fit into Category:Music software plugin architectures?

Can anybody in the know tell me if DirectSound, apart from its regular usage in games, is used by Music software applications, like sequencers and DAW to add sofware synthesizers and software effects to audio tracks? Which ones? Thanks :-) Peter S. 17:06, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I know Winamp 5 uses DirectSound for crossfading. I'll put it in the category. « SCHLAGWERK^{Talk to me!} 01:14, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, all applications that want to take advantage of hardware acceleration or other advanced features, use DirectSound on Windows. The old Windows multimedia API pretty much only allows supports playing back a raw bytestream. I can imagine that most music software applications use the standard DirectSound filters/effects where possible. -- intgr 07:01, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Downloading DirectSound

Looking around I could find NO website hosting latest or old version of DirectSound? Is the only way to update this software with DirectX?124.185.152.12 05:49, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, DirectSound is tightly bolted down to DirectX. But note that Wikipedia talk pages are for discussing the article, not asking for help on the topic. -- intgr 07:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] DirectSound plays *all* audio?

The last bit of the article says "if they are using Windows, which ever software they use, whether Winamp, the RealPlayer, the Windows Media Player, or something else, it is DirectSound that allows that software to play the music from their library." WinMM is another way to play these things (in fact, WMP uses DirectShow, although it might use DirectSound underneath). In fact, "dsound.dll" imports functions from winmm.dll.

[edit] Xaudio in a separate article.

We should have a separate article for Xaudio, as there will be a lot more specific information people will want about this soon, in context of DX 10.1. Ofunniku 10:41, 2 September 2007 (UTC)