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Audio (RSS)

Stuff about Audio in Windows and beyond.

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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What's this untitled slider doing on the Vista volume mixer?

Someone sent the following screen shot to one of our internal troubleshooting aliases. They wanted to know what the " Name Not Available " slider meant. The audio system on Vista keeps track of the apps that are playing sounds (it has to, to be able to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 08, 2008 2:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 80 Comments
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Analog to Digital Conversion

Steve Rowe (test lead on the sound team) points to a great article from Ars Technica on D2A: If you want digital audio in a computer, you have to get it from somewhere. Usually that means taking analog sound out of the air and turning it into the bits Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007 11:49 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
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What happens when audio rendering fails?

Skywing sent me an email earlier today asking me essentially "Why doesn't Windows do a better job of handling the case where the default audio device goes away?"[1] It's a good question, and one that we've spent a lot of time working on for quite some Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2007 1:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
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An Overview of Windows Sound and "Glitching" Issues

Nick White over at the Windows Vista Blog just posted an article written by Steve Ball , the PM in charge of the sounds team. It does a pretty good job of covering why my $2000 PCs sometimes glitches like crazy, while my $20 CD player works perfectly Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 30, 2007 4:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 30 Comments
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"Memory Leak" when using the Vista Audio API notification routines

We recently got an internal report from someone using the internal audio notification APIs that they were leaking memory and they wanted to help from us debugging the problem. I took a look and discovered that the problem was a circular reference that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

The evolution of a data structure - the WAVEFORMAT.

In the beginning, there was a need to be able to describe the format contained in a stream of audio data. And thus the WAVEFORMAT structure was born in Windows 3.1. typedef struct WAVEFORMAT { WORD wFormatTag; WORD nChannels; DWORD nSamplesPerSec; DWORD Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:13 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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