As a recent purchaser of a set of bluetooth headphones, I frequently run into the situation of loading a media file before realising that the wrong default audio device is selected. As a result, I've had to shut down IE or WMP in order to change the default audio device before I can hear the audio from my chosen media.
Thinking this was just an issue with Vista, I put it to the back of my mind and tried to keep a mental note. Today I checked my blog subscriptions and found that (once again) Larry Osterman has done a great job of describing why this happens.
Larry's short answer: "It's the responsibility of the application to deal with handling errors. The audio stack bubbles out the error to the application and lets it figure out how to deal with the problem."
What I love about Larry's blog is that he always gets into the nitty-gritty. In this blog post, he goes into how applications access Vista's audio functionality and what developers can do to make their applications handle this situation.
My question for today is, if any application can handle this situation, then why doesn't WMP 11...?
Larry Osterman's WebLog : What happens when audio rendering fails?
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Vista,
Audio Devices