|
Windows Legacy Audio Components
This article describes audio APIs and components in Microsoft Windows which are now obsolete or deprecated. Multimedia Extensions (MME) The MME API or the Windows Multimedia API (also known as ''WinMM'') was the first universal and standardized Windows audio API. Wave sound events played in Windows (up to Windows XP) and MIDI I/O use MME. The devices listed in the ''Multimedia/Sounds and Audio'' control panel applet represent the MME API of the sound card driver. The Multimedia Extensions ( interfaces) were released in autumn 1991 to support sound cards, as well as CD-ROM drives, which were then becoming increasingly available. The Multimedia Extensions were released to Original equipment manufacturer, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), mainly CD-ROM drive and sound card manufacturers, and added basic multimedia support for audio input and output and a Compact disc, CD audio player application to Windows 3.0. The Multimedia Extensions' new features were not available in Wind ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sectors of the computing industry – Windows (unqualified) for a consumer or corporate workstation, Windows Server for a Server (computing), server and Windows IoT for an embedded system. Windows is sold as either a consumer retail product or licensed to Original equipment manufacturer, third-party hardware manufacturers who sell products Software bundles, bundled with Windows. The first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The name "Windows" is a reference to the windowing system in GUIs. The 1990 release of Windows 3.0 catapulted its market success and led to various other product families ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video For Windows
Video for Windows was a suite of video-playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows 95. Video for Windows was mostly replaced by the July 1996 release of ActiveMovie, later known as DirectShow. Overview Video for Windows was first introduced in November 1992. It was developed as a reaction to Apple Computer's QuickTime technology, which added digital video to the Macintosh platform. Costing around $200, the product included video editing software, editing and transcoding, encoding programs for use with video input boards. A runtime version for viewing videos only was also made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.11; it then became an integral component of Windows 95 and later. Like QuickTime, Video for Windows had three key aspects: Audio Video Interleave (AVI), a container file format designed to sto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, it is lossy compression (except for Dolby TrueHD). The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35 mm film prints. It has since also been used for TV broadcast, radio broadcast via satellite, digital video streaming, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and game consoles. Dolby AC-3 was the original version of the Dolby Digital codec. The basis of the Dolby AC-3 multi-channel audio coding standard is the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), a lossy audio compression algorithm. It is a modification of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm, which was proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972 for image compression. The DCT was adapted into the MDCT by J.P. Princen, A.W. Johnson and Alan B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987. Dolby Laboratories adap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hardware Mixing
Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calculated in software running on a generic CPU can also be calculated in custom-made hardware, or in some mix of both. To perform computing tasks more efficiently, generally one can invest time and money in improving the software, improving the hardware, or both. There are various approaches with advantages and disadvantages in terms of decreased latency, increased throughput, and reduced energy consumption. Typical advantages of focusing on software may include greater versatility, more rapid development, lower non-recurring engineering costs, heightened portability, and ease of updating features or patching bugs, at the cost of overhead to compute general operations. Advantages of focusing on hardware may include speedup, reduced power co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latency (audio)
Latency refers to a short period of delay (usually measured in milliseconds) between when an audio signal enters a system, and when it emerges. Potential contributors to latency in an audio system include analog-to-digital conversion, buffering, digital signal processing, transmission time, digital-to-analog conversion, and the speed of sound in the transmission medium. Latency can be a critical performance metric in professional audio including sound reinforcement systems, foldback systems (especially those using in-ear monitors) live radio and television. Excessive audio latency has the potential to degrade call quality in telecommunications applications. Low latency audio in computers is important for interactivity. Telephone calls In all systems, latency can be said to consist of three elements: codec delay, playout delay and network delay. Latency in telephone calls is sometimes referred to as delay; the telecommunications industry also uses the term ''quality of exp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pulse-code Modulation
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amplitude of the analog signal is sampled at uniform intervals, and each sample is quantized to the nearest value within a range of digital steps. Alec Reeves, Claude Shannon, Barney Oliver and John R. Pierce are credited with its invention. Linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) is a specific type of PCM in which the quantization levels are linearly uniform. This is in contrast to PCM encodings in which quantization levels vary as a function of amplitude (as with the A-law algorithm or the μ-law algorithm). Though ''PCM'' is a more general term, it is often used to describe data encoded as LPCM. A PCM stream has two basic properties that determine the stream's fidelity to the original analog signal: the sampling rate, which is the number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on May 15, 1998, and generally to retail on June 25, 1998. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid 16-bit computing, 16-bit and 32-bit application, 32-bit monolithic product with the booting, boot stage based on MS-DOS. Windows 98 is World Wide Web, web-integrated and bears numerous similarities to its predecessor. Most of its improvements were cosmetic or designed to improve the user experience, but there were also a handful of features introduced to enhance system functionality and capabilities, including improved USB support and accessibility, and support for hardware advancements such as DVD players. Windows 98 was the first edition of Windows to adopt the Window ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows Driver Model
In computing, the Windows Driver Model (WDM) also known at one point as the Win32 Driver Model is a framework for device drivers that was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to replace VxD, which was used on older versions of Windows such as Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, as well as the Windows NT Driver Model. Overview WDM drivers are layered in a stack and communicate with each other via I/O request packets (IRPs). The Microsoft Windows Driver Model unified driver models for the Windows 9x and Windows NT product lines by standardizing requirements and reducing the amount of code that needed to be written. WDM drivers will not run on operating systems earlier than Windows 98 or Windows 2000, such as Windows 95 (before the OSR2 update that sideloads the WDM model), Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 3.1. By conforming to WDM, drivers can be binary compatible and source-compatible across Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectMusic
DirectMusic is a deprecated component of the Microsoft DirectX API that allows music and sound effects to be composed and played and provides flexible interactive control over the way they are played. Architecturally, DirectMusic is a high-level set of objects, built on top of DirectSound, that allow the programmer to play sound and music without needing to get quite as low-level as DirectSound. DirectSound allows for the capture and playback of digital sound samples, whereas DirectMusic works with message-based musical data. Music can be synthesized either in hardware, in the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth, or in a custom synthesizer. History DirectMusic was first released by Microsoft in 1996 as an ActiveX control called Interactive Music Architecture (IMA). It was introduced as part of the 6.1 version of the DirectX library in February 1999 and is included in all Microsoft Windows operating systems starting with Windows 98 Second Edition. DirectMusic has since been deprecated, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectSound
DirectSound is a deprecated software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system, superseded by XAudio2. It provides a low-latency interface to sound card drivers written for Windows 95 through Windows XP and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams. DirectSound was originally written for Microsoft by John Miles. Besides providing the essential service of passing audio data to the sound card, DirectSound provides other essential capabilities such as recording and mixing sound, adding effects to sound (e.g., reverb, echo, or flange), using hardware accelerated buffers (if the sound card supports hardware acceleration) in Windows 95 through XP, and positioning sounds in 3D space. DirectSound also provides a means to capture sounds from a microphone or other input and controlling capture effects during audio capture. After many years of development, today DirectSound is a mature API, and supplies many other useful capabilities, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FLAC
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data. FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC supports metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking. History Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bitstream format was frozen with the release of version 0.9 of the reference implementation on 31 March 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001. On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis. Version 1.0 of Vorbis was released in May 2000. Since 2013, the Xiph.Org Foundation has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec, an improved and more efficient format that has also been developed by Xiph.Org. Name Vorbis is named after the character Exquisitor Vorbis in the '' Discworld'' novel '' Small Gods'' by Terry Pratchett. The Ogg format is named after ''ogging'', jargon from the computer game '' Netrek''. Development Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
