Using Downloadable Sounds

This section covers the practical use of downloadable sounds (DLS) in DirectMusic. For an architectural overview of DLS, see Downloadable Sounds.

Most applications do not have to deal directly with instruments or downloadable sounds. The opening of collections and downloading of instrument data is handled by the DirectMusicBand object. When you download a band, all the instrument data associated with that band is downloaded as well. For more information, see Using Bands.

For specialized DirectMusic applications that do their own DLS management, two steps must be taken: loading the instrument collection and downloading data for individual instruments to a port.

These steps are covered in the following sections:

• Loading a Collection
• Working with Instruments
• Playing a MIDI File with Custom Instruments

Applications that allow the editing of instruments and collections need to work with DLS data at an even lower level. This topic is covered in the following section:

• Low-Level DLS