Larry Osterman, a Microsoft employee, has a blog where he discusses among other things the improvements being made in the audio stack of Windows Vista:

What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?
Windows Audio Quality Enhancements

I think it's about time. What do you audio geeks think about this?

I think that it won't have any effect, the Windows Pro Audio community are all using driver stacks based on things like ASIO and GSIF which were born out of the Windows MME being totally and utterly crap and, in some cases, the need for a cross platform standard for accessing the drivers. Both the standards mentioned above bypass the Windows audio stuff completely.

It will make stuff based on the Windows stack more useable but unless they manage to convice Steinberg to drop ASIO and TASCAM to drop GSIF it's not going to have much effect elsewhere. However it looks like what MS are doing is re-implementing what Apple have done with CoreAudio but for Windows. MS might get eveyone to switch but they will have to be careful. MS have utterly broken the audio system in Windows (for professional use) in service packs before now and sometimes not fixed it for years, they'll have to gain backend audio programmers trust first then everything else will follow.

Good to know their guys are so on the ball, next they will discover doubles with a 52 mantissa...

Seriously though, work on an improved Sample Rate converter is well overdue (I am guessing it is the same one in XP as in Win95).

That is what jumped out at me of the two articles.

I was wondering if this improvement in MSVista will allow people who use their PC's as a mixer to edit and EQ compilations without degrading the final product?

I've read this is why a lot of @home sound engineers recomend taking thier stuff to expensive studio's with all hi$ equipment to do the DSP? Do you think this improvement(Vista) will help them(or us, for that matter)?

If so, how? Are rounding errors really that bad?......Sorry if I sound ignorant, I AM!

It's nice that they're doing a total overhaul of the audio stack. As everyone else has said, long overdue and all that.

Unfortunately, nowhere in the two blogs does he mention the DRM issue. Other parts of Vista's media code are being totally rewritten as well. A major reason for "why now?" is so they can write a new stack that is DRM aware from top to bottom. You have to know that this isn't just to please the audiophiles and sound engineers -- they're only a fraction of MS's market, and we know that MS tends to ignore problems that only affect small groups. I will bet that in order to use this fancy new audio mode, you will be required to have a sound card that is DRM compliant in both hardware and drivers, or else you will be locked out. Possibly locked out into something worse than what we have now. Something very similar is being rumored for the video stack.


Seems more like it's been the same since 98, since that was the start of WDM audio. But maybe they just recycled the old one.

One rounding error is not bad. But if you're processing audio in multiple steps, and you have rounding errors in each step, they accumulate and multiply. This is why you see advice to home recorders to record and edit in 24 bit, then convert to 16 bit in the last step.

Yes, I agree. The video lock-out is not a rumor, unfortunately:

On Windows Vista, DRM, and new monitors

The Microsoft whitepaper is here:

Output Content Protection and Windows Longhorn

What would you think if you just spent US$ 3,000 on a new monitor and discovered that you'll not be able to see high-def content on it? (Off-topic, sorry.)

All you need is a "middle man" device which attaches to your conventional monitor and appears as a HDMI monitor to Windows. Windows then allows content to be sent normally and the device strips the HDMI and sends the unprotected signal to the monitor. These devices do exist already but would be illegal in some countries as they could be considered a copyright circumvention tool.

They are also horrifically expensive. In the last round of wars the RIAA and the MPAA didn't much care if removing the technological measure required a piece of kit costing many thousands of dollars. Now with the rip once be over the internet in days they do care if even just one person can break their protection.

The Protected Media Path in Vista is basically a sop to the content providers and as observed elsewhere in the thread if it's a choice between making stuff easy for Pro Audio or some fancy DRM "feature" for the MPAA they are going to go for the appease the MPAA route.

A large amount of the cultural output of the 20th century has been lost due to copyright law I suspect the vast majority of the output of the 21st century will be lost to DRM.

The emergence of DRM is a god send to MS, it means that they can break vast amounts of backwards compatability and obsolete vast amounts of hardware compatability and point the finger at the copyright lobby and the government.

There's a new entry that discusses the new Vista audio APIs:

New Audio APIs for Vista

WASAPI (Windows Audio Session API) seems very interesting. In exclusive mode it's like foobar2000 kernel streaming. All user-level Windows audio APIs (MME, DirectSound, etc.) were rewritten to be layered over WASAPI.