Playing WAV Sounds in Music Time

Because a WAV sound has no tempo, the loader cannot calculate the music-time length of a segment loaded from a WAV file or resource, and it always sets the length to 1 tick. In consequence, you cannot cue another segment to play immediately after a WAV segment by using the DMUS_SEGF_QUEUE flag. A further limitation is that you must play the WAV segment from the beginning, because IDirectMusicSegment8::SetStartPoint fails with any parameter greater than the known music-time length of the segment.

To overcome these limitations, you must set the length of the segment to a music-time value equivalent to the clock-time length of the sound. The length of the sound can be calculated from the WAV chunk headers. The following sample function sets the length of a WAV segment whose length is known:

HRESULT SetWAVLength(IDirectMusicSegment8* pSeg, 
        DWORD tempo,        // In beats per minute.
        float wavLength)    // In seconds.
{
  if (pSeg)
  {
    MUSIC_TIME mt;
    mt = (wavLength * DMUS_PPQ * tempo) / 60;
    return pSeg->SetLength(mt);
  }
  else return E_POINTER;
}

See Also

• Clock Time and Music Time
• IDirectMusicSegment8::SetLength