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DirectSound is a deprecated software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system. DirectSound provides a low-latency interface to sound card drivers written for Windows 95 through Windows XP and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams. Besides providing the essential service of passing audio data to the sound card, DirectSound provides other essential capabilities such as recording and mixing sound, adding effects to sound (e.g., reverb, echo, or flange), using hardware accelerated buffers in Windows 95 through XP, and positioning sounds in 3D space. DirectSound also provides a means to capture sounds from a microphone or other input and controlling capture effects during audio capture.〔(DirectSound Capture Effects: MSDN )〕 After many years of development, today DirectSound is a mature API, and supplies many other useful capabilities, such as the ability to play multichannel sounds at high resolution. While DirectSound was designed to be used by games, today it is used to play audio in a large number of audio applications. DirectShow uses DirectSound's hardware audio acceleration capabilities if the sound card's hardware audio acceleration capabilities exist and are exposed by the audio driver.〔(DirectShow FAQ )〕 ==Features== DirectSound is a user mode API that provides an interface between applications and the sound card driver, enabling applications to produce sounds and play back music. DirectSound was considered revolutionary when it was introduced in 1995, as it featured multiple simultaneous audio streams and allowed several applications to access the sound card simultaneously. Before that, the game developers were required to implement their own audio rendering engine in software. DirectSound provides sample rate conversion and sound mixing (volume and pan) for an unlimited number of audio sources, however the practical limits are the number of hardware audio sources and the performance of software mixers. The DirectSound architecture features a concept of the "ring buffer" which would be continuously played in a cycle. The application programmer creates the sound buffer then continuously queries its state through the "read cursor" and updates it with the "write cursor". There are two types of buffers - a "streaming" buffer, which holds continuous sounds such as background music, and a "static" buffer which holds short sounds. On supported sound cards, DirectSound would try to use "hardware accelerated" buffers, i.e. the ones which either can be placed in local sound card memory, or can be accessed by the sound card from the system memory. If hardware acceleration is not available, DirectSound would create audio buffers in the system memory and use purely software mixing. Some late DOS-era "wavetable" sound cards such as Sound Blaster AWE32 and Gravis Ultrasound featured dedicated DSPs, which were borrowed from the digital music instruments. These cards featured local memory which could be used for buffering multiple audio streams and mixing them on board, thus offloading the CPU and greatly improving the sound quality. However this was only possible in DOS by directly programming the hardware, and full-featured "hardware acceleration" from the local memory was never implemented on these cards, due to complexities of double buffering. Later cards such as Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy and X-Fi are capable of accessing the system memory buffers directly. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「DirectSound」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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