DirectSound: Enumeration
By: Jack Hoxley
Written: May 2000
Download: DS_Enum.zip (8kb)

Sound drivers can be very important to enumerate. Good quality sound cards are only just becoming standard in computers, and there are still plenty out there are just click and beep at you. Allowing a person to choose which sound driver to use can have a big influence on your program. For example, my faster computer has 7 different sound drivers, 6 of which work with Directsound. I dont personally like choosing the first (default) driver on the basis that it sounds worse (but runs faster), I choose to use the fourth one - which produces excellent music and sound effects. This is a perfect example of it being a good thing to allow users to choose their hardware.

Luckily, enumeration is very simple; requiring under 10 lines of code. Here's what you need to check the sound drivers and compile them into a list:

This code will output a list of devices into a combo box called combo1; should you wish the data to go elsewhere just modify this code. Dont worry if it only gives you one driver - there's nothing wrong with the code, it just means that you only have 1 directsound driver.

This next bit needs to replace your current line:

That's it - Told you it was simple.

You can download a modified version of the DirectSound: Basics tutorial that includes enumeration either from the top of the page or from my downloads page.