Where is the right place to implemente audio extensions

[TEK]

I'm wondering if anyone can give me a starting point for developing
sound processing utilities for Vista.
I see that there is some audio utilities use for XP today, as
Envolope, AC3Filter and stuff like that.

To me it seems like many of these requiers knowledge about the program
playing the sound to work.

If you were to develope a sound filter, crossover and room correction
utility.
This utility would be independent of the player that generates the
sound. It should be applied to any sound beeing played from the
computer.

In my mind this should have been implemented on the driver level, for
example as a virtual driver that has support for all kind of advanced
room correction, cross over settings and so on. By selecting that
driver as the default driver the room correction feature would be
enabled for all parts of the system that was using the default driver.

A easy implementation of this would be to implement a driver that to
Vista looks like a traditional driver, and that peformed it's task on
the audio stream before the handled stream was passed through on to
the "real" audio driver.

What do you think? Is this the correct place to do something like
this, or should it be done somewhere else in the audio chain when the
target is to make it independent of the end player utility?
And where can I get the nesessarly information about how to develope a
driver like this?

Regards, TEK

 

[AlexB]

I've studied the subject for my reason but my needs were much more modest
and in the end I resolved them by finding an API that worked in Vista.

Your task is 10 orders of magnitude greater and you may be facing an uphill
battle. There will be a steep learning curve if you have no background in
writing audio code.

There is plenty of information at MSDN sites. It is accessible to general
public. There is some information at MSDN forums but not much. If you are
comfortable with C++ that will be the best way to go. You can do it in C# or
VB. There are some sample packages in C# of Sound recording and Sound
Player, nowhere near to what you are intending to do. They still present a
huge challenge. For one thing they have been written for .NET Mobile and
some of the dlls they are using are not accessible in .NET 2.0. The
functions could be found elsewhere, though.

I tried to compile one of the packages and it did but was unable to run it.
There were persistent errors which was hard to interprete. It could be that
I had an analogue mike at that time plugged in. I may try it again with
digital but now I do not really need the whole thing which is fairly large.

You will have to deal with dozens if not hundreds of structures, Each
structure will have dozens if not hundreds of variables or constants. You
will probably have to devote about 3-6 month to just studying the whole
thing if you have no experience with doing such projects.

 

[AlexB]

I've studied the subject for my reason but my needs were much more modest
and in the end I resolved them by finding an API that worked in Vista.

Your task is 10 orders of magnitude greater and you may be facing an uphill
battle. There will be a steep learning curve if you have no background in
writing audio code.

There is plenty of information at MSDN sites. It is accessible to general
public. There is some information at MSDN forums but not much. If you are
comfortable with C++ that will be the best way to go. You can do it in C# or
VB. There are some sample packages in C# of Sound recording and Sound
Player, nowhere near to what you are intending to do. They still present a
huge challenge. For one thing they have been written for .NET Mobile and
some of the dlls they are using are not accessible in .NET 2.0. The
functions could be found elsewhere, though.

I tried to compile one of the packages and it did but was unable to run it.
There were persistent errors which was hard to interprete. It could be that
I had an analogue mike at that time plugged in. I may try it again with
digital but now I do not really need the whole thing which is fairly large.

You will have to deal with dozens if not hundreds of structures, Each
structure will have dozens if not hundreds of variables or constants. You
will probably have to devote about 3-6 month to just studying the whole
thing if you have no experience with doing such projects.