Talk:DirectSound

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')."

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. « S CHLAGWERK  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)

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)

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.

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)


 * Long overdue, section splitted to XAudio2. --Dmitry (talk •contibs ) 11:15, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Happy to see comparisons, but not complete
Some of the material describes alternatives, like under Vista, but doesn't mention DirectKS like this q&a: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdirectshowdevelopment/thread/a47f5cd8-7a32-407d-a71d-d129d339c501 which points to http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/directks.mspx

Maybe a page dedicated to comparisons, with a possible table for latencies, compatibilities, etc would be best, out of the list of: WinMM? MME? ASIO? WASAPI? OpenAL? XNA? Xact? At least links to them. I find a lot of people asking similar questions out there, and no common direction.

This page has some nice comparison info, but not complete either: http://www.staudio.de/kb/english/drivers/

It seems like DirectSound is a good starting point API for a lot of Windows versions. Any additional caveats? There seem to be a number of sampling rate accuracy issues.

I would add a link to http://www.microsoft.com/directx for those poor folks who happen to stumble on this page looking to fix a sound issue :)

What about Win7,8 and recent CE's?

Thanks Hansschulze (talk) 06:26, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I have added sections on KMixer/KS in 2000/XP and some general API references.
 * As for latency comparisons, WinMM/MME and XNA/XACT are purely software libraries and so latencies are huge, and DirectSound has no latency control at all, which limits its use for professional audio applications. ASIO and WASAPI do feature latency control, but WASAPI currently lacks any hardware acceleration, and though Sonar supported WASAPI from the start, Cubase didn't until recently. No wonder audio professionals still use Windows XP and ASIO even today.
 * Maybe if Windows 8 "hardware offloading" feature takes up, then hardware-accelerated WASAPI would make a leap. For now, ASIO is the only practical choice for latency-critical applications. --Dmitry (talk •contibs ) 10:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Maybe if Windows 8 "hardware offloading" feature takes up, then hardware-accelerated WASAPI would make a leap. For now, ASIO is the only practical choice for latency-critical applications. --Dmitry (talk •contibs ) 10:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

DirectSound3D has existed before DirectX 3
The page states that "DirectSound3D (DS3D) is an extension to DirectSound introduced with DirectX 3 in 1996 with the intention to standardize 3D audio in Windows." under the section about DirectSound3D. However, I'm currently reading the documentation for the original release of DirectX (found here) and it contains numerous references to the  interface. Is this section referring to some sort of split in API interfaces? — BinaryPhyiscs (talk) 20:22, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

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