Reading 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 It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs.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.]

WAV files are in the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF), which consists of a variable number of named chunks containing either header information (for example, the format of sound samples) or data (the samples themselves). The Win32 API supplies functions for opening and closing RIFF files, seeking to chunks, and so on. The names of these functions all start with "mmio".

To store WAV sounds in an executable, import your WAV files as resources and give them string names.

The DirectSound API does not include methods for loading sound data. However, the DXUTsound.cpp file implements several classes that can be used to create sound buffers from files, resources, or a memory location.