DirectSound8 has different behavior on windows 7 vs windows 10 wrt headphones plugged in

Question

On a windows 10, with no headphones plugged in:

DirectSoundCreate8 returns S_OK
IDirectSoundBuffer8::Play returns 0x8889000F (potentially AUDCLNT_E_ENDPOINT_CREATE_FAILED) 

and this is the first call to return any error.

On a windows 7, with no headphones plugged in:

DirectSoundCreate8 returns DSERR_NODRIVER;

The problem is, if the Play() call is the first call to return that anything is amiss, I have to have already loaded and decoded a sound (expensive) just to figure that I can't play sounds...

This seems crazy so I must be doing something wrong.

Answer 1

The behavior difference here is that Windows 10 / Windows 11 is using Virtual Audio Devices for WASAPI, while Windows 7 version of WASAPI does not support virtual audio devices.

The reason virtual audio devices were introduced is because WASAPI end-points come and go as the speakers/headphones are plugged and unplugged. WASAPI clients had to handle this scenario by destroying and reattaching to end-points. For XAudio2 API users, this was surfaced as an 'on-critical-error' that required games to destroy and re-create their audio graphs as sound devices were physically removed. With the new virtualized behavior, WASAPI moves the end-points around automatically.

XAudio2 clients can opt-out of this behavior by using XAUDIO2_NO_VIRTUAL_AUDIO_CLIENT when using XAudio 2.9 either as part of the Windows 10 / Windows 11 OS or when using XAudio2Redist on Windows 7 SP1 or later.

DirectSound has had various levels of emulation since Windows Vista, and its behavior is mostly tuned for appcompat with existing titles. This list of limitations for DirectSound has been true since Windows Vista:

• LOC_HARDWARE buffers are unsupported.

• Surround-sound (beyond stereo) buffers are supported as LOC_SOFTWARE (on Windows XP, these had to be LOC_HARDWARE).

• Effects (I3DL, EAX, etc.) are not supported through DirectSound.

• DirectSound 3D audio continues to support only mono channel sounds, while XAudio2 supports multi-channel 3D audio.

• Appcompat shim are applied in some cases to redirect the 'default' device from DSDEVID_DefaultPlayback to DSDEVID_DefaultVoicePlayback (or DSDEVID_DefaultCapture -> DSDEVID_DefaultVoiceCapture for capture).

I'm not aware of any 'opt-out' flag for the virtualized audio device for DirectSound, but if you enumerate an audio device via DirectSoundEnumerate and use that GUID instead of the default device, it will likely bypass it.

The latest version of the DirectSound samples from the legacy DirectX SDK are on GitHub. They build with modern Visual C++, and do not make use of the legacy DirectX SDK. The DirectSound samples do require the Visual C++ MFC optional component to be installed.