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Audio (RSS)

Stuff about Audio in Windows and beyond.

Elliot Omiya, Frank Yerrace and I make a video…

Charles just let me know that he’s posted a video that Elliot, Frank and I did talking about the audio features added to Win7 and some of the architectural decisions that went into it.   Enjoy! Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 11, 2009 2:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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A quick run through the new Windows 7 multimedia audio SDK samples

As I mentioned yesterday, the Windows SDK is now live .  For the Windows SDK, there are 9 new samples (and one changed samples).    Two of the SDK samples demonstrate the WIndows 7 “Ducking” feature – they’re actually based on the code Read More...
Posted Friday, August 07, 2009 12:17 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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The Windows 7 SDK is live!

I just received email that the new Windows 7 SDK is now live !  Apparently it’s not on the Windows SDK download site yet, but if you click on the first link, you can download an ISO which contains the SDK.  For the Win7 SDK, I wrote about 8 Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 06, 2009 4:56 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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A few of my favorite Win7 Sound features – Stream Switching

Way back when I was in college, I learned Lisp using a derivative of Lisp called MACLISP (named for MIT’s project MAC, not for anything that came from a fruity company in Cupertino).  One of the coolest features that MACLISP offered was the (DWIM) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments
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A few of my favorite Win7 Sound features – Capture Monitor (aka Listen to…)

The capture monitor is a feature that allows you to listen to a portable media player (or any other microphone input) through your PC speakers.    First a bit of history.  Way back in the dark ages (Windows XP timeframe), audio solution Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 04, 2009 10:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments
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A few of my favorite Win7 Sound features – UI refinements

Well, we shipped Windows 7, and now I’d like to talk about a few of my favorite features that were added by the Sound team.  Most of them fit in the “make it just work the way it’s supposed to”, but a few are just cool. I also want to call out some Read More...
Posted Monday, August 03, 2009 4:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 64 Comments
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Windows 7 fixes the PlaySound(XXX, SND_MEMORY|SND_ASYNC) anti-pattern

A number of times in the past, I’ve mentioned that the PlaySound(xxx, xxx, SND_MEMORY|SND_ASYNC) pattern is almost always a bad idea.  After the last wave of crash dumps were received for this problem, our team decided to do something about it.  Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 24, 2009 2:54 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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PlaySound(xxx, SND_MEMORY | SND_ASYNC) is almost always a bad idea.

Whenever you submit a crash report to OCA , a bug gets filed in the relevant product database and gets automatically assigned to the developer responsible for the code.  I had a crashing bug in the PlaySound API assigned to me.    In this Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

When you do UX work, sometimes you have to worry about the strangest things…

I recently got a bug reported to me about the visuals in the sound control panel applet not being aligned properly (this is from the UI for a new Windows 7 feature): The problem as reported was that the microphone was aligned incorrectly w.r.t. the down Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 13, 2009 9:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Why do people think that a server SKU works well as a general purpose operating system?

Sometimes the expectations of our customers mystify me.   One of the senior developers at Microsoft recently complained that the audio quality on his machine (running Windows Server 2008) was poor. To me, it’s not surprising.  Server SKUs are Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 08, 2009 10:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 70 Comments
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Why specify SND_NODEFAULT when calling PlaySound?

Because the alternative is often much worse.   Several months ago, I got a bug report that if you launched mmsys.cpl then set the “Select” sound to a value, then cleared the sound, the reporters application would ding whenever you moved around their Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 2:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

They just announced my PDC talk, so I guess I can mention at least the title of the talk.

The PDC folks just announced a host of Windows 7 related PDC talks , one of which is mine. The title of the talk is “Windows 7: Building Great Communications Applications”.  You can find it under the Windows 7 track on the Microsoft PDC site .   Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:21 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Why call PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_NODEFAULT)?

Someone just wandered over to my office and he had noticed the following pattern in his code: PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_NODEFAULT); PlaySound( ".Default" , NULL, SND_SYSTEM | SND_ASYNC | SND_NODEFAULT); He was wondering why on earth the code Read More...
Posted Monday, September 15, 2008 5:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Why doesn’t Windows support amplification of audio samples?

Nils Arthur asked in another post: While we are talking volume controls. Could you explain why it's only possible to lower the volume in Windows (i.e. setting a volume between 0% and 100%) and not raise it (i.e setting it higher than 100%)? Before I get Read More...
Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 9:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
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Whatever happened to Wave Out Mix?

The Intertubes are all atwitter with reports that  Dell and other OEMs   colluded with the RIAA to disable the Wave Out Mix   option on new laptops. Wow, what a tempest in a teapot.  I just LOVE watching conspiracy theories as the Read More...
Posted Friday, July 11, 2008 2:54 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments
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