About Audio Device Drivers

Windows provides low-level audio services for multimedia applications. Applications and MCI device drivers can use these services to control audio devices such as MIDI synthesizers and waveform audio hardware. Audio devices must have a corresponding audio device driver to be used with Windows. This topic shows you how to write audio device drivers for different types of audio hardware. It covers the following topics:

• The different types of audio devices
• General information about writing an audio device driver
• Specific information about writing device drivers for the different types of audio devices
• An alphabetical reference to the functions, messages, and structures used to write audio device drivers

Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the audio services available with Windows, and with digital audio and MIDI. For information about the audio services of Windows, see the Multimedia Programmer's Reference in the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit.