Hi, my name is Steve Ball and I'm a Principal Program Manager Lead on the Windows Sound Team. I'd like to take a moment and give some background on sound schemes in Windows as well as the new sound schemes released as Ultimate Extras and their relationship with the default Windows Vista scheme.

Default Windows Vista Sound Scheme
The default Windows Vista sound scheme was designed with the same principles that were used in designing the Windows Vista visual elements and desktop experience.  In contrast, the Windows XP sounds, while appropriate at the time and for that product design, were very ‘Western' and literal, using pianos and western orchestral instruments.   The XP sounds were designed to complement the ‘photo-realistic' Bliss desktop (blue sky, green grass photo.)  The Windows XP sounds can also be rather percussive and jarring in the context of day to day PC use, so it was an explicit goal to re-orchestrate the default Windows Vista sounds to complement the softer, cleaner theme and user interface elements in Windows Vista.  

For Windows Vista, it was an intentional design goal to avoid ‘reinventing' the User Interface language for sound.  For example,

The following is an article from another of my colleagues on the Windows Vista Sound team, Kristin Carr.  Kristin is a Program Manager and works with Steve Ball, who previously has shared his insights into how Windows Vista handles sound.  If you have questions for Kristin, please leave a comment below.

Many people have a general idea of what S/PDIF is -- perhaps by seeing it as a label on an audio output, or on a feature list for a product.  But what is it exactly, and how do you use it?  This post will cover some of those details.

On a PC, the audio is stored and processed digitally until the final output stage when it is usually converted to an analog signal that directly feeds your speakers.  However, there may be times when you want to transmit the signal digitally to a different device that will be used to play the sound, such as a receiver.  In these cases, you may want to postpone converting the signal to an analog one, and instead transmit the signal digitally to avoid any degradation and additional noise that may occur when transmitting an analog signal.

For this

If you have a large collection of MP3s, WMAs and other audio files, you probably have quite a few where the tag information isn’t set up properly. In other words, they don’t come up with the correct track name or artist in your media player.

Editing these tags manually can be a laborious task, but fear not, the contributers at MusicBrainz offer a solution to your problem. As they say themselves:
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

The website has a number of applications that you can download which access the database. The one I found most useful was Picard, which provides an interface to search the…

Below is part 2 of an audio series by Windows Vista Audio team Program Manager Richard Fricks, the first being Richard’s piece on Using a microphone array to enhance sound capture . This follow-on article details how to get more out of your PC by using Read More……(read more)

Below is part 2 of an audio series by Windows Vista Sound team Program Manager Richard Fricks, the first being Richard’s piece on Using a microphone array to enhance sound capture.  This follow-on article details how to get more out of your PC by using a digital microphone.

The digital microphone is a perfect fit for Windows Vista’s microphone array technology.  Digital microphones have been around for years, but until recently, the ability to integrate such technology into an everyday laptop computer at an affordable price has not.  Did I mention they are incredibly compact?  Here is a picture of a bottom-port Akustica digital microphone:

Akustica AKU2000

This is a great example of a high quality, cost-effective digital microphone that is easily integrated into a laptop PC.

There are some unique characteristics of this particular microphone that warrant mention.  First of all, Akustica has a unique fabrication process that allows them to incorporate the entire design onto a single chip of silicon.  This monolithic design places the sensor, microphone circuitry, amplifier and converter all together on one chip.  This is a great step

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The following post comes from my colleague Steve Ball, Senior Program Manager for Sound in Windows Vista, and continues his team’s on-going series on how Windows Vista treats various forms of audio.

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Part I: Why does my Windows sound sometimes “glitch?”

Windows is a rich and complex OS designed for multi-tasking users whose tasks must share access to scarce system hardware and resources.  Unfortunately, despite multiple decades of incredible advances in PC and CPU architectures, there are non-trivial, complex interactions between applications, processes, and devices in even the most advanced personal computers that make a supposedly “easy” task — like playing back music without occasional glitches — much more difficult than it may seem at first glance.

Another way of thinking about this:  it seems odd that a modern >$2000 PC may sometimes have trouble seamlessly playing back music when $20 CD players can effortlessly playback music without glitches. 

So why do many $2000 PCs occasionally glitch while playing back music?  The quick answer is this:  Windows is not a single-function device like a CD player.

A slightly longer answer goes like this:  even an average Windows machine today is commonly used simultaneously as a media player, word

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