Opening Waveform-Audio Input Devices
[The feature associated with this page, Waveform Audio, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs. WASAPI and Audio Graphs have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use WASAPI and Audio Graphs instead of Waveform Audio, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]
Use the waveInOpen function to open a waveform-audio input device for recording. This function opens the device associated with the specified device identifier and returns a handle of the open device by writing the handle of a specified memory location.
Some multimedia computers have multiple waveform-audio input devices. Unless you know you want to open a specific waveform-audio input device in a system, you should use the WAVE_MAPPER constant for the device identifier when you open a device. The waveInOpen function will choose the device in the system best able to record in the specified data format.
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