DirectSound

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since November 2006. (help, talk)

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.