What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Venu Anuganti — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:30:49 GMT

Larry,

Thanks for the sharing the info, good one. I will update my blog later with this info.

I found an interesting issue with Real Player on the BETA1 of vista. Here is what happens:

Lets say I am playing 2-3 songs in the real player, and during the song play, even when I reduce the volume by clicking on the volumn button from the taskbar, and when the player goes to next song, the volumn goes back to default one, which it picks during the load.

I dont see this issue in 2003 or XP, but only happens on Vista.

Any idea ? or any way I can tweak this ? I have a video captured for this, and will post this later once am back to home from office

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Jerry Pisk — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:06:22 GMT

"one of the leading causes of Windows reliability problems" - tell me about it. I had to return about 90% of audio cards I bought because the drivers simply would not work for more than few minutes of playing audio on a multiple cpu system (and I mean multiple CPU, not just HT). Mixing multiple sources when you can actually have multiple requests coming in at literally the same time proved to be beyond most hardware manufacturers' skill. The only card that worked reliably for me was an old AWE32 running Microsoft's drivers but I can't use that anymore as my current mobo does not have an ISA slot. I'm currently using a card based on VIA's Envy24-HF chip with VIA's drivers, it doesn't sound as good as some other cards but at least it does not crash my box.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Mark Lambourne — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:08:30 GMT

Larry,

On the "pro audio"-side, are there any changes that make it "easier" for applications to bypass things like kmixer and achieve real bit-perfect digital output of digital content?

Presently, there are workarounds required - ASIO, kernel streaming, etc.

Thanks,
Mark

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

LarryOsterman — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:01:12 GMT

Mark, I'll be talking about the changes for pro audio in a bit.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

elPiojo — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:03:47 GMT

Thanks for explaining this with all of us. My girlfriend is really going to like the possibility to turn down all those noisy Windows Sound, still being able to listen to Music. I hope the technology will make soon make it in a CTP build, unfortnatly it’s missing / turned of in 5219.

It’s also great to discover these days, trough Blogs and channel9 video’s that Microsoft is very ambitious about Vista.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

msvista — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:06:03 GMT

"UI improvements won't be seen by non Microsoft people until Vista Beta2"...

But you could post some screen shots in your blog, I assume :) :) :)

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Diego — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:29:18 GMT

Larry,

Are codecs are involved here? I mean...bad codecs are one of the typical "windows problem"...how are codecs involved in all this? Thats what you meant about "the leading causes of Windows reliability problems"? Are there some docs with a high-level overview of the whole audio subsystem (Sound is one of those things that nobody cares about because "it always works" and I've certainly not found anything about it ;)

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Dev Mazumdar — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:51:21 GMT

I invite you to check out http://www.opensound.com/virtmix.html - Open Sound System (OSS) for UNIX (& Linux) does per-application volume control, per-application vu-metering and ossxmix and /dev/sndstat shows what app is running on which channel. We had these features this back in 2001 :) -

On top of it we have an RIAA-curve equalizer (yes the very same evil RIAA did some interesting research back in the 60s and 70s), fidelity enhance (similar to SRS-WoW) and stereo image enhance. I don't know Vista doesn't give you a system wide equalizer.

BTW, 4Front isn't just a UNIX shop, we do Windows and Mac OSX plugins as well (www.oss3d.com) - hope to exchange ideas with you guys sometime - glad to actually see who the Windows audio guys are!.

I got to say Vista is looking pretty impressive . Good work!

Regards
Dev Mazumdar
4Front Technologies
dev@opensound.com

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

steamy — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:54:01 GMT

Larry,

all this is sooo welcomed, i'm a pro-audio guy, and i was looking for info on Vista audio for years, no one answered my questions. Maybe you will:-)

As i'm reading that you are going to post more info relating these things, the only question of mine is: are there going to be anything like ASIO built in windows? low latency (ultra-low) input-output stuff?

Only one more...i'm REALLY REALLY curious: are there ANY changes to MIDI???? for example better MIDI timing?

thank you guys for your work in this department, windows needed these changes so much!!!

steamy

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Norman Diamond — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:05:52 GMT

> The first (and biggest) change we made was
> to move the entire audio stack out of the
> kernel and into user mode.

Um, that's interesting. Are you still on speaking terms with a certain famous company who once moved the entire video stack out of user mode and into the kernel?

Monday, September 19, 2005 3:06 PM by Jerry Pisk
> The only card that worked reliably for me
> was an old AWE32 running Microsoft's drivers
> but I can't use that anymore as my current
> mobo does not have an ISA slot.

Plus your next OS (Vista) won't support an ISA slot even if your mobo has one.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Interested Observer — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:00:19 GMT

Did it occur to anyone at Microsoft that the reason that audio/streaming drivers are so buggy is the *complete* lack of usable documentation? The audio/streaming documentation in the DDK is without peer in terms of how poor it is. A little bit of effort put into the documentation could have radically cut down on the number of buggy device drivers.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Tim Smith — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:33:09 GMT

Don't get me started on the dual CPU/audio crash problems.

MS has received MANY crash reports from my machine for that problem.

grrrrrrrrrr

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

elpiojo — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:30:05 GMT

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

LarryOsterman — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:41:38 GMT

elpiojo, most of the audio infrastructure is there, but the UI that makes it all work isn't :(

It's in the mainline Windows depot currently, so...

Steamy, we're not doing a lot with MIDI in Vista, unfortunately :(

And I'll talk a bit about the low latency stuff later on.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Lee — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:03:41 GMT

Just curious, if you rewrote some of your stuff from scratch did you code any of it managed? What are the guidelines (if any) when working within the operating system with regards to using the framework?

Regards
Lee

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Evert Mouw — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:13:53 GMT

Oh, the OSS for Linux is already replaced by the ALSA system.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Raptor — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:20:54 GMT

Larry,

You said that in pre-Vista versions there are many parts of the audio subsystem still on the Kernel.

However, since XP the MS introduced a new service called Windows Audio. I though it was part of the attempt to move audio core out of the kernel. But as you say it is not. How does this service fits in the current and upcoming audio model?

Thanx in advance,
Raptor

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Raptor — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:42:29 GMT

Larry,

What does the Windows Audio service introduced in XP? I though it purpose was to take audio core code out of kernel.

Raptor

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

David Walker — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:01:30 GMT

Does emptying the recycle bin still trigger the computer's motherboard speaker to "beep" if the sound scheme is set to No Sounds? ;-)

I find that very annoying.

If the sound for "Empty Recycle Bin" is set to "None", the built-in motherboard speaker beeps on emptying the recycle bin. If it is set to something else, the attached speakers play the sound. None seems to be "not an option". AFAIK, emptying the recycle bin is the only event that triggers this beep.

Frustrating. I disabled the system device called "beep" on two of my systems, XP Pro and Windows 2000, out of frustration for this long-standing Windows bug! Windows Server 2000 has the same problem.

David

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Roland — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:14:29 GMT

Great news! Thanks for the info, Larry!

And I'm especially happy that many parts of the audio subsystem have moved to USER, because just last week, I had a blue screen in kmixer.sys (brand new DELL computer with Soundblaster Audigy 2). I'm sure this would no longer have occurred in Vista.

Regards
Roland

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

LarryOsterman — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:00:16 GMT

Raptor, the Windows Audio service in XP essentially just manages PnP notifications for winmm.dll to allow apps to use winmm without bringing in setupapi.dll.

It does some more than that (related to management of audio global effects), but that's essentially all it does.

David, that's interesting - let me see if it happens.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Charlie Jolly — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:28:05 GMT

If Windows Vista is serious about pro audio, I suggest that you check out the community at http://www.kvraudio.com/ and enlist their expertise.

Also, comparisons will inevitably be made to Mac OSX and things like 'Core Audio', 'MIDI Network driver', 'Audio Units' etc. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreaudio/

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

PatriotB — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:26:58 GMT

Moving from kernel mode to user mode is quite a big change. One poster already mentioned how MS moved the video stack (back in NT 4) from user mode to kernel mode, to improve performance. I assume moving audio out of the kernel will have a small performance hit, but that it probably isn't much for today's computers.

Interesting to see components moving out of the kernel, while at the same time, things are still moving into it (e.g. http.sys for IIS).

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

LarryOsterman — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:54:08 GMT

Patriot, it's a matter of trade-offs. Video was moved to the kernel primarily because User had to do SO many cross-process operations - it's constantly sending messages from one process to another, moving it to the kernel allows a significant improvement in efficiency.

For Audio, back in 1997, we couldn't do mixing of audio streams without being in the kernel, in 2002, the story is quite different.

I suspect that the hit will be less than most people expect.

http.sys was moved to the kernel for a number of reasons - performance was one of them, but having a single HTTP parsing and rendering engine is another huge part of the equation.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Soundtweaker — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 06:41:58 GMT

I hope Windows Media Player 11 can play 24 bit audio files. It's long overdue. I'm tired of using Winamp just to playback my DVD-Audio mixdowns.

re: What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Andriy Gerasika — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 23:02:20 GMT

Guys,
check out http://www.indievolume.com/ - Windows desktop enchacement, having all functionality Vista is about to have and even more - it allows selection of per-application FX effects, and per-application selection of playback audio devices.

Thanks,
Andriy Gerasika

Melodiefabriek » Blog Archive » A stripped XP, not Vista

Melodiefabriek » Blog Archive » A stripped XP, not Vista — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 23:25:02 GMT

PingBack from http://melodiefabriek.nl/2006/09/01/a-stripped-xp-not-vista/

Windows vista disposera d'une architecture audio de qualité professionnelle

Olivier Dewit — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 19:24:27 GMT

Dans le monde de l&#39;enregistrement audio num&eacute;rique, la latence correspond au temps d&rsquo;attente

beta @ amanzi » Vista Feature Focus: Volume Mixer

beta @ amanzi » Vista Feature Focus: Volume Mixer — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 03:49:17 GMT

PingBack from http://beta.amanzi.co.nz/2006/09/30/vista-feature-focus-volume-mixer/

Audio in Vista: Better for Consumers, Less So For Soundcard Companies

Nicholas' Blog-O-Rama — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 08:36:01 GMT

Nicholas' Blog-O-Rama - Audio in Vista: Better for Consumers, Less So For Soundcard Companies

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 08:36:04 GMT

PingBack from http://www.pdsys.org/blog/2006/12/30/AudioInVistaBetterForConsumersLessSoForSoundcardCompanies.aspx

Tim Anderson’s ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:17:12 GMT

PingBack from http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=272

» We need less whining, more complaining about Vista | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:28:28 GMT

PingBack from http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=288

» Everything you’ve read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3) | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:07:42 GMT

PingBack from http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309

Tim Anderson’s ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Another pro musician gives up on Vista audio

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:39:58 GMT

PingBack from http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=450

why vista sounds better than xp? (spdif out) - Tech ARP Forums

why vista sounds better than xp? (spdif out) - Tech ARP Forums — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:04:43 GMT

PingBack from http://forums.techarp.com/general-hardware/23542-why-vista-sounds-better-than-xp-spdif-out.html#post320000

Constant people crying about Vista, please F*** off - DriverHeaven.net

Constant people crying about Vista, please F*** off - DriverHeaven.net — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:28:05 GMT

PingBack from http://www.driverheaven.net/flame-warzone/155482-constant-people-crying-about-vista-please-f-off.html#post1129442

Why Linux Will Never Succeed on the Desktop at freakified

Why Linux Will Never Succeed on the Desktop at freakified — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:34:43 GMT

PingBack from http://www.freakified.net/news/why-linux-will-never-succeed-on-the-desktop/

jaew00k.net » Blog Archive » Larry Osterman’s WebLog : What’s up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Tue, 06 May 2008 18:58:37 GMT

PingBack from http://jaew00k.net/blog/?p=5

Windows 7 beta - Page 6 - Hardware Canucks

Windows 7 beta - Page 6 - Hardware Canucks — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:17:50 GMT

PingBack from http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/o-ss/13325-windows-7-beta-6.html#post133167

lphant - Strona 2 | hilpers

lphant - Strona 2 | hilpers — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:31:50 GMT

PingBack from http://www.hilpers.pl/436547-lphant/2

Larry Osterman s WebLog What s up with Audio in Windows Vista | Outdoor Ceiling Fans

Sun, 31 May 2009 17:06:54 GMT

PingBack from http://outdoorceilingfansite.info/story.php?id=17791

Larry Osterman s WebLog What s up with Audio in Windows Vista | patio set

Larry Osterman s WebLog What s up with Audio in Windows Vista | patio set — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:13:45 GMT

PingBack from http://patiosetsite.info/story.php?id=590