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DirectSound is software supplied by Microsoft that resides on a computer with the Windows operating system. It provides the interface between applications and the sound card, enabling applications to produce sounds and music. Besides providing the essential service of passing audio data to the sound card, it provides many needed capabilities. Of these audio mixing and volume control are the most essential. DirectSound also allows several applications to conveniently share access to the sound card at the same time. Its ability to play sound in 3D added a new dimension to games. It also provides the ability for games to modify a musical script in response to game events in real time, ie: the beat of the music could quicken as the action heats up. DirectSound also provides effects such as echo, reverb, and flange. After many years of development, today DirectSound is a very mature API, and supplies many other useful capabilities, such as the ability to play multichannel sound and sounds at high resolution. The evolution of DirectSound has benefited by the extremely high level of participation of software developers from all over the world. It has provided the impetus behind the modern music revolution where now we take it for granted that our computers, besides doing mundane tasks, will at a minimum entertain us with music whenever we wish. When people rip their music from CDs and save it as mp3, 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. Image File history File links Information_icon. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ... An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... Application software is a defined subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly to a task that the user wishes to perform. ... API may refer to: In computing, application programming interface In petroleum industry, American Petroleum Institute In education, Academic Performance Index This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... RIP may stand for: Rest In Peace, a phrase which often appears on tombstones. ... CDS may refer to: Commercial Data Systems, Ltd. ... MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. ... Winamp is a multimedia player made by Nullsoft. ... RealPlayer is a media player, created by RealNetworks, that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, and Windows Media formats as well as multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo codecs. ... Windows Media Player (WMP) is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. ...

DirectSound is part of the DirectX library. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ...

See also

• DirectSound3D

DirectSound3D is an addition to Microsofts DirectX system which is intended to standardize 3D audio under Microsoft Windows. ...

External links

• Microsoft's DirectSound documentation
• juhara.com - DirectX programming resources for Delphi developers - Playing WAV and MIDI with DirectX Audio

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