Architectural Overview for DirectSound

DirectSound implements a new model for playing and capturing digital sound samples and mixing sample sources. Like other elements of the DirectX API, DirectSound uses the hardware to its greatest advantage whenever possible, and it emulates hardware features in software when the feature is not present in the hardware.

System Integration

The following illustration shows the relationships in Microsoft® Windows® CE .NET between DirectSound and other system audio components.

DirectSound and the standard Windows waveform-audio functions provide alternative paths to the waveform-audio portion of the sound hardware. A single device provides access from one path at a time. If a waveform-audio driver has allocated a device, an attempt to allocate that same device by using DirectSound will fail. Similarly, if a DirectSound driver has allocated a device, an attempt to allocate the device by using the waveform-audio driver will fail.

If two sound devices are installed in the system, your application can access each device independently through either DirectSound or the waveform-audio functions.

COM Interfaces

DirectSound playback is built on the IDirectSound Component Object Model (COM) interface and on the IDirectSoundBuffer interface for manipulating sound buffers.

DirectSound capture is based on the IDirectSoundCapture and IDirectSoundCaptureBuffer COM interfaces.

Finally, the IDirectSoundNotify interface is used to signal events when playback or capture has reached a certain point in a buffer.

 Last updated on Thursday, April 08, 2004

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