The first step in implementing DirectSound in an application is to create a DirectSound object, which creates an instance of the IDirectSound interface.
A DirectSound object describes the audio hardware on a system. The IDirectSound interface enables your application to define and control the sound card, speaker, and memory environment.
This section describes how your application can enumerate available sound devices, create the DirectSound object for a device, and use the methods of the object to set the cooperative level, retrieve the capabilities of the device, create sound buffers, set the configuration of the system's speakers, and compact hardware memory.