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Using WAV Data

[The feature associated with this page, DirectSound, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs. Media Casting have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use Media Casting instead of DirectSound, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

Under the Windows driver model (WDM), DirectSound hardware buffers can play any uncompressed or compressed sound format that can be described in a WAVEFORMATEX or WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE structure, provided the format is supported by the hardware. Software buffers and non-WDM hardware buffers support only 8-bit and 16-bit uncompressed formats.

Waveform (or WAV) data is usually stored in files or resources in Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). The data includes a description of the WAV format, including parameters such as the sampling rate and number of output channels.

More information on WAV sounds is included in the following topics: