Steve Ball - Learning about Audio in Windows Vista | scobleizer

gaelhatchue

Great video, really.

I have a question though. Do third party applications appear in the volume control window ( like WMP)? I mean, if you download RealPlayer (annoying today, since it controls the system volume), does it appear in the list?

Manip

I'm sure I guessed per-application volume control, I might have posted it here or on Larry's blog.

Looks very cool.

Quick Question: if I have an application, I set it on mute, then I exit the application, restart, reload the application will the OS remember my mute setting? I am just thinking about stopping flash animation in my browser from making ANY sounds.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Interesting stuff! I wonder if per-application sound driver works the same way as DirectSound where an app is given a virtual buffer to stuff sound data in. But there is still a system-level driver that mixes all the application-level buffers for the sound card.

mycroft

gaelhatchue wrote:
Great video, really.

I have a question though. Do third party applications appear in the volume control window ( like WMP)? I mean, if you download RealPlayer (annoying today, since it controls the system volume), does it appear in the list?

That behaviour has been unbelievably irritating to me, hopefully they'll stop applications from controlling the master volume in that way.

One potential issue that I see is that an application will have its volume control and Windows will also have its own separate volume control associated with that application which could potentially make things even more confusing unless the two are linked together bidirectionally. I don't know if you could force an application to change its internal volume level when adjusting it from the windows volume control.

Another thing i'd like to see is improved microphone callibration so you don't have to fiddle with the mic and line in levels manually, and perhaps support for changing audio ports between input and output. Hopefully they bring in all the features that are now included in the numerous crappy sound card control panels that come with the hardware into Windows itself so I can do away with those altogether.

LarryOsterman

gaelhatchue wrote:

Great video, really.

I have a question though. Do third party applications appear in the volume control window ( like WMP)? I mean, if you download RealPlayer (annoying today, since it controls the system volume), does it appear in the list?

Of course - otherwise it wouldn't work right.

And real player will no longer control the system volume, we redirect that to be per-application.

LarryOsterman

Minh wrote:
Interesting stuff! I wonder if per-application sound driver works the same way as DirectSound where an app is given a virtual buffer to stuff sound data in. But there is still a system-level driver that mixes all the application-level buffers for the sound card.

It's all in user mode, and somewhat more complicated than that, but extremely roughly, that's what's going on.

LarryOsterman

Manip wrote:
I'm sure I guessed per-application volume control, I might have posted it here or on Larry's blog.

Looks very cool.

Quick Question: if I have an application, I set it on mute, then I exit the application, restart, reload the application will the OS remember my mute setting? I am just thinking about stopping flash animation in my browser from making ANY sounds.

I think you did as well. And for your question, the answer is "Of course - we persist all volume controls across process restarts" Smiley

We've spent a lot of time ensuring that stuff works like you want it to work.

Having said that, stopping flash isn't in the cards, unless you plan on stopping all audio from IE Sad

This is because we can't differentiate audio played by the flash ActiveX control and audio played by the Quicktime ActiveX control. The mechanisms exist to make this work, but it requires changing the application.

LarryOsterman

mycroft wrote:

One potential issue that I see is that an application will have its volume control and Windows will also have its own separate volume control associated with that application which could potentially make things even more confusing unless the two are linked together bidirectionally. I don't know if you could force an application to change its internal volume level when adjusting it from the windows volume control.

Another thing i'd like to see is improved microphone callibration so you don't have to fiddle with the mic and line in levels manually, and perhaps support for changing audio ports between input and output. Hopefully they bring in all the features that are now included in the numerous crappy sound card control panels that come with the hardware into Windows itself so I can do away with those altogether.

Improved Mic callibration is a part of what we're doing. And suppoting the audio port remapping you're describing is actually a feature of the HDAudio support (it requires new audio hardware to enable that support).

Also, you may not have seen it in the UI, but we've put a great deal of effort into ensuring that the relationship between the various app volumes and the system volume is transparent and seamless.

And yes, you can force the apps volume control to change from inside Windows.

This works because every apps volume runs through the audio engine and the policy agent in the engine accesses the same volume control the app does.

Having said that, if the app's volume slider is implemented on a DirectX secondary buffer, then we can't control that volume slider - because the volume attenuation occurs before it hits the global audio engine. We may be able to do something about it, but no promises.

mycroft

Thanks Larry, getting quite excited about this. Vista seems to finally be solving alot of the niggles that I was hoping XP would do away with.

First Solitaire gets updated, then Sound Recorder, now all I need as a new version of Paint and i'll be set for the next 5 years.