Entries tagged with audio - Channel 9

Elliot H Omiya, Larry Osterman and Frank Yerrace: Inside Windows 7 - Audio Stack

Charles — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:44:00 GMT

One of the central engineering and design themes of Windows 7 is efficiency: efficiency in user experience (things work as and when expected, reliably), efficiency in processing, execution, diagnostics, performance, scheduling, window managment, graphics, desktop search, etc. Well, not surprisingly, Windows 7's audio system has been engineered to provide very efficient user experience (when you plug your headphones in the system streams music to your headphones as expected. When you remove them Windows will switch the stream to flow into your speakers - this is known as real time stream switching - but how does it work, exactly?). What, exactly, is new in the Windows audio system? What's been improved since Vista? What is sound, really? (Yes, we talk about this at the end of the interview - interesting stuff indeed). You first learned about some of the updates to Windows audio in an interview with Larry in September '08. We dig into more detail here (whiteboard included plus we discuss a few things you probably do not know about...)

Here, Architect Elliot H Omiya, Principal Software Developer Larry Osterman and Principal Software Developer Frank Yerrace take us through the details of Windows 7 audio, including some history, some design decisions, some hard problems and overall a great conversation about how Windows makes noise (or music - it's all relative :)).

Enjoy. Lots to learn here. Elliot, Larry, Frank and the Windows audio team have done excellent work in this iteration of Windows. Find some time (I know. It's hard.) Get comfortable and learn all about the innerworkings of Windows 7's audio.

This Week C9: Speech Recognition, Army of 1, TweetCraft and more

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:26:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week's top developer news, including:

- Joel Bennett - Control your PC with your voice and PowerShell, via Alvin Ashcraft
- Frank La Vigne - Speech Recognition in WPF
- Dan Waters - Great 4-part series on Audio Programming
- Andrew Woodward - Doing Agile in a Team of One
- Leah Budley - UX Team of One, via Frank La Vigne
- Aaron Marten - Visual Studio 2010 User Interface Guidelines
- Corey Schuman - YouTube video in Silverlight 3, via Alvin Ashcraft
- Tina Wood - The History of Microsoft 1995
- Jaime Rodriguez - Best questions/answers in the WPF Discussions email alias
- MySpace Releases MSFast, a browser plugin for measuring CPU, memory, screenshost, HTML rendering, and more (download)
- Registering Preview Pane types using PreviewConfig, via Greg Duncan
- Alois Kraus - The differences between Logging and Tracing

Picks of the week
Brian's pick of the week: Habib Heydarian - Debugging a Unit Test Failure with the Historical Debugger
Dan's pick of the week: TweetCraft an in-game World of Warcraft Twitter client, including a gratuitous video trailer

PS - Happy fourth of July to our American viewers

Pete Brown, Silverlight Wizard in Action

Adam Kinney — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Pete Brown brought along some fun toys to MIX09 written in the Silverlight 3 Beta which he demonstrates in this video. The first toy is a Commodore64 emulator running print commands and the Dr. Who game. The second toy, or in this case maybe tool would be more applicable, is his audio synthesizer which generates sound dynamically within Silverlight.

Since MIX09, Pete has been very busy posting tutorials on some of the newest features available in Silverlight 3:

Coding4Fun Demo - How to mask your voice using the Skype Voice Changer

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:05:00 GMT

Mark Heath (of NAudio fame) recently published a how-to article for Coding4Fun that shows how he plugged into Skype's audio APIs to dynamically apply different sound effects to the audio stream to mask your voice.

To see it in action, we setup a Skype connection between me and Clint Rutkas. Clint screen captured his PC so you can see the Skype Voice Changer application, while I recorded Clint's voice with the sound effects applied.

Coding is fun :)

Larry Osterman: Windows 7 Audio - What's New

Charles — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:41:00 GMT

The great Larry Osterman discusses what excites him most about Windows 7's new audio features. Of course, we talk about all things audio as Larry is a 24 year veteran of Microsoft and best known as the developer who makes Windows go ding. He's also an avid blogger.

TechFest - Lie Lu and Frank Seide - Music Steering Project

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:25:03 GMT

The Music Steering Project is a software project that analyzes audio content to dynamically build a playlists of similar music (similar to Pandora). This enables you to easily discover new artists and songs, a problem I've personally had with a Zune subscription. It also enables you to set the mood of music you want to listen to and have the software automatically build you a playlist based on your mood.

TechNet Radio: A first look at Microsoft's Unified Communications solutions

erickingfrog — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:08:56 GMT

Join Sukhvinder Singh Gulati, Sr. Lead Program Manager, for a first look at Microsoft's newest unified communications solutions. Sukhvinder will discuss products like Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007, Office Live Meeting 2007, Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging, and devices like Microsoft Office RoundTable. He'll explain how Microsoft is integrating all your unified communication needs in one single portfolio of products, making it easier to manage and administer your communications.

Eric Ostrowski - Your Show Host and TechNet Radio Producer
Kevin Remde – IT Pro Evangelist
Sukhvinder Singh Gulati - Sr. Lead Program Manager

geekSpeak recording: Speech Server with Michael Dunn

glengo — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:32:20 GMT

In this geekSpeak (or maybe we should say "geekSpeech") we explore Microsoft Speech Server technologies, focusing on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

After covering how Speech Server is now incorporated into OCS 2007, we talk about how it now supports industry standards for building IVR applications like SALT and VoiceXML. Michael shows a cool demo of creating a voice response workflow using the new designers based on Windows Workflow Foundation, which is incredibly easy to use.

It's pretty exciting to see how integrated this technology is with .NET so you can do things like utilize WCF, make web service calls, reuse a data access or business logic layer, program in C# or VB, etc.

Some great quesitons came through on the geekSpeak including using Speech Server with robotics as well as how to manage grammar, keywords, and concept answers. Michael also helps us understand considerations for design your voice UI around speech recognition versus DTMF (touch-tones).

We also touch on testing approaches as well as how to work with systems such as Skype and Vonage.

For more resources on Speech Server technologies, go to http://www.microsoft.com/speech as well as Michael's blog http://gotspeech.net/blogs/michaeldunn .

Let us know through here and the geekSpeak blog what you'd like to see geekSpeaks in the future cover.

Cakewalk: Making Music with Sonar

Charles — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:47:51 GMT

The guys at Cakewalk are passionate about music and providing the technology that enables audio enthusiasts & professionals to create great music. Noel Borthwick, Cakewalk CTO and Carl Jacobson, Woldwide Marketing Director, spend some time with Inside Out talking about their lessons learned as an early Vista adopter for their audio application Sonar, which also is the only application of its kind for the 64-bit platform.

They also talk candidly about the development process and experiences with managed code, certification documentation and virtualization.

The Voice of Support - Show 011: The Zune Support Experience

gsamedia — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:12:24 GMT

Welcome to the Show #11 of The Voice of Support!

In this session, we sat down with Nabil Pike, Lead Program Manager for Zune Supportability. Nabil talks about the day-to-day activities of the Zune support team, his history here @ Microsoft, and the history of building the support experience for the Zune from concept to market. This is a really cool device - and if you haven't checked it out yet, you really should. :D

While we certainly have a lot of support-related content ideas to bring you, we really hope to hear from you, our listeners, about the specific topics you'd like to hear about in future sessions! Please use our Ask for It form to let us know what you think!

LINKS

Support WebCasts

Zune.net

The Voice of Support - Show 009: Supporting Xbox and Xbox 360 Kiosks in Retail Outlets

gsamedia — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 20:13:15 GMT

Welcome to the ninth installment of The Voice of Support!

This week, we sat down with Steve Miles, Retail Support Manager here at Microsoft, to discuss supporting those Xbox and Xbox 360 kiosks you see in various retail stores across the world, and some of the really cool features and new levels of interactivity they provide.

Throughout the month of November here, we will be focusing on some really exciting products and devices, including some more shows on the Xbox 360. These will be released on a weekly basis, as we have a LOT of content - so stay tuned!

While we certainly have a lot of support-related content ideas to bring you, we really hope to hear from you, our listeners, about the specific topics you'd like to hear about in future sessions! Please use our Ask for It form to let us know what you think!

LINKS

Download the Transcript

-->Microsoft Support WebCasts

Windows Vista WAVE - Windows Audio Video Excellence

Charles — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 18:16:17 GMT

Back in January of 2006, Scoble visited Steve Ball, Kirt Debique and the WAVE (Windows Audio Video Excellence) team to discuss their contributions to Windows Vista. WAVE is the team responsible for Audio and Video infrastructure in Windows including, among other things AV class drivers, rendering and capture APIs (including DirectShow and Media Foundation), and end to end AV performance.

We also get a preview of a feature called "glitch resilience" that enables very high quality audio and video playback performance on Windows Vista, even in resource-constrained situations.

Vista Audio Stack and API

Charles — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 02:44:17 GMT

Charles recently caught up with seasoned Niner, Larry Osterman, an SDE and 20 year Microsoft veteran, and Elliot H Omiya, a Software Architect and audio guru, to dig into the innerworkings of Vista's updated Audio Stack and new user mode API. Much of the guts of Windows audio have been moved up into the land of the user and this has consequences for both Windows audio developers at the API level and for Windows at the general programmability, reliability and stability levels. Great stuff.

Enjoy