About Waveform Audio

Adding sound to your application can make it more efficient and more fun to use. You can improve your users’ efficiency by using sounds to get their attention at critical points, to help them avoid mistakes, or to let them know that a time-consuming operation has finished. You can help them have more fun by adding music or sound effects.

This overview explains how to do the following things with sound:

Play waveform audio.
Use waveform-audio services.
Record waveform audio.
Use auxiliary audio devices.
Use audio clipboard formats.

This overview documents several methods for adding sound to your application. The simplest method documented here is that of using the PlaySound function. Most of the other waveform-audio API elements documented in this overview are relatively low-level. However, the MCI overview documents an interface to multimedia programming that offers method of adding sound to your application that is simpler and faster than using the waveform-audio sound API.