I’ve been writing software synthesizers for Windows since the Windows 95 era. The low-level audio API for that (sometimes called “waveOutX” and “waveInX” was a pain in the ass to deal with programmatically but once you figured it out it worked very well and totally reliable. I’ve been continuously amazed (and secretly happy) that for the last 30 fucking years they’ve just kept bringing that same exact API forward. Even Windows CE/Windows Mobile had that shit in it in the early '00s, which let me get my code working on PDAs and the earliest smartphones. Every attempt Microsoft has made to replace this API has somehow managed to be much more difficult to work with and simultaneously buggy as hell.
I think MS actually used to have some capable engineers (one of them who helped develop the waveOutX API I actually know by name, Larry Osterman) but they all fucked off with their tens of millions of dollars in stock options decades ago and what’s left is a disasterclass.
I’ve been writing software synthesizers for Windows since the Windows 95 era. The low-level audio API for that (sometimes called “waveOutX” and “waveInX” was a pain in the ass to deal with programmatically but once you figured it out it worked very well and totally reliable. I’ve been continuously amazed (and secretly happy) that for the last 30 fucking years they’ve just kept bringing that same exact API forward. Even Windows CE/Windows Mobile had that shit in it in the early '00s, which let me get my code working on PDAs and the earliest smartphones. Every attempt Microsoft has made to replace this API has somehow managed to be much more difficult to work with and simultaneously buggy as hell.
I think MS actually used to have some capable engineers (one of them who helped develop the waveOutX API I actually know by name, Larry Osterman) but they all fucked off with their tens of millions of dollars in stock options decades ago and what’s left is a disasterclass.