[wdmaudiodev] What would you Recommend for Testing a Virtual Audio Driver?

  • From: "Don Bell" <0dbell@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wdmaudiodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:13:06 -0500

I am currently facing a very difficult task of concocting a working virtual
audio device driver *prototype* within a week...

It can crash, have lots of bugs, not fully featured, etc. but it has to be
able to demonstrate simultenaous bidirectional input/output.

My main problem is that the device driver is not tied to real hardware, but
rather is supposed to receive its input from and play its output to an
external (user mode) program.

If it were a device driver for real hardware, I would simply fire up an
existing application like Microsoft Sound Recorder (yes, that simple app
that comes with any version of Windows), record myself, play it back and
verify that I have satisfactory results (for this stage only - I know that
tests should be much more thorough than this).

But with no microphone & speaker, how do I test it without writing an entire
win32 application? Is there a tool that can help test a device driver at
such early stage? Something that would compare buffers, streams, etc.?

And if I have to write such a test application, what would you recommend for
using as an API? The old venerable waveOut/waveIn API or the newer &
supported (for 64-bit) DirectSound API?

Are there any special requirements for an audio device driver to support
DirectSound (vs. supporting the old wave* API)?

Please pardon my inability to hide my current ignorance in the subject. I
could spend weeks reading the thousdands of pages of documentation of the
various SDKs, but I am hoping to take a shortcut by using samples as much as
possible, getting some general guidance and tips from you - and later invest
significant time and effort in understanding things as thoroughly as
possible (and practicle).

Are these questions you could answer?

Thanks in advance!
Don

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