Owner`s manual

80
The new driver is a WDM driver. This means it was natively developed for
Windows 2000 (that is, it’s not a legacy driver running on a newer OS). However,
WDM drivers work differently (again, this is simplified):
Audio application
⇓
Microsoft’s WDMAUD wave driver
⇓
Microsoft’s kernel-mode audio mixer (a.k.a. the kmixer)
⇓
Echo WDM driver
⇓
PCI card
So you can see that there are now several layers of software interposed between
our driver and the application. This means we have had to give up some control
over how this works.
Unfortunately, this causes some pain; the worst of it is the WDMAUD wave driver
breaks most of the software out there that supports 24-bit audio. WDM audio, not
our driver, is now in charge of which wave devices get listed and which formats
we accept. It also means we have less control over the names of the wave devices,
which is less painful, but still annoying.
As things stand, we are investigating the possibility of somehow combining the
old and new approaches to get the best of both worlds.
Q: So if it causes all these problems, why bother with WDM?
Because everyone asked us to. ☺
No, seriously, it has a number of benefits. The obvious ones are Plug-n-Play
support (no more seventeen-step install process) and native support for Windows
2000 and XP, which we haven’t had up ‘til now.
It’s also the wave (get it?) of the future; Cakewalk’s SONAR gets excellent results
by talking directly to the WDM driver and bypassing most of the layers in the
above diagram. Other software vendors are pursuing the same approach.