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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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Hey, my custom shutdown sound got cut off (or didn't play). What's up?

Chris Pirillo had an interesting blog post the other day with the rather uninformative title of " Windows Vista Sound Problems ". He has a reader who built a shutdown sound that is almost 2 minutes long, and that reader is upset that the system isn't Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 4:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

Playsound is failing on Vista! What's wrong?

Recently BillP , the author of the antispyware application WinPatrol asked on the MSDN forums about a problem he was having with his application . His app called PlaySound(MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDR_WOOF), hInst, SND_RESOURCE | SND_SYNC | SND_NOWAIT) but it Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:01 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

Blocking your UI thread with PlaySound

For better or worse, the Windows UI model ties a window to a particular thread, that has led to a programming paradigm where work is divided between "UI threads" and "I/O threads". In order to keep your application responsive, it's critically important Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007 10:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Curvy Volumes

Silly story. Way back when I first joined the audio team, Steve Ball (the PM for the team) showed up for work one day with his SPL meter. It seems he'd gone home and used his SPL meter to measure the output of the speakers. Much to his surprise, the volume Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 09, 2007 1:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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