Windows and Multimedia

In one sense, multimedia is all about getting access to various pieces of hardware through device-independent function calls. Let’s look at this hardware first and then the structure of the Windows multimedia API.

Multimedia Hardware

Perhaps the most commonly used piece of multimedia hardware is the waveform audio device, commonly known as the sound card or sound board. The waveform audio device converts microphone input or other analog audio input into digitized samples for storage in memory or disk files with the .WAV extension. The waveform audio device also converts the waveform back into analog sound for playing over the PC’s speakers.

The sound board usually also contains a MIDI device. MIDI is the industry standard Musical ...

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