TABLE OF CONTENTS The existing Windows XP audio subsystem contains a rich legacy driven by backwards compatibility. Many of today's Windows XP audio "features" exist only because they were useful long ago and could not be removed. Windows Vista will completely restructure the audio subsystem and its release will be a much larger break from legacy applications than any that has ever taken place in Windows audio. However, to understand why the audio in Windows XP works that way it does, you need to first understand how it evolved. For a complete summary of audio driver evolution, see Appendix C, "Drivers from DOS to Windows XP."
As new audio functionality was added to each generation of Windows, the control of audio in Windows XP became distributed throughout a number of different control panels, often with no easy way to get from one to another, and with little or no end-user documentation. This chapter describes a few of the critical controls and what they do. Setting these controls improperly could cause failures during audio fidelity or usability testing. Most, if not all, of these control panels will change with the upcoming release of Windows Vista, which is described later in Chapter 8.
Right-click on the speaker icon in the system tray and select "Adjust Audio Properties" to open the Sounds and Audio Devices control panel in Windows XP. You can also open it from the Control Panels on the start menu. Click on the Audio tab...
