Summary

We have just started to explore the power of DirectSound in this chapter, with the Cacophony tool that demonstrates the effects of changing a sound s volume, panning position and frequency. As you saw, this can be valuable in an application that does not have an underlying 3-D model.

It is possible to extend 2-D sound even further than the Cacophony tool does, with the use of special effects such as distortion and echo. However, postpone going further into these effects until you have learned the basics of 3-D sound in the next chapter. A few developers may choose to run with the 2-D sound features and leave 3-D sound alone; if you are one of them, you might work the special effects code from Chapter 4 into the Cacophony tool to provide the specific effects supported by DirectSound.

The key lesson from this chapter is that the utility code can be extended to support control over individual buffers in CSound objects. The value of the utility code is clear from the use of the CWaveFile class. Although this class is part of the DirectSound framework, rather than part of the SDK, it is too valuable to just be considered a utility.