Determining Nonstandard Format Support

[The feature associated with this page, Waveform Audio, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs. WASAPI and Audio Graphs have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use WASAPI and Audio Graphs instead of Waveform Audio, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

To see whether a device supports a particular format (standard or nonstandard), you can call the waveOutOpen function with the WAVE_FORMAT_QUERY flag. The following example uses this technique to determine whether a waveform-audio device supports a specified format.

// Determines whether the specified waveform-audio output device 
// supports a specified waveform-audio format. Returns 
// MMSYSERR_NOERROR if the format is supported, WAVEERR_BADFORMAT if 
// the format is not supported, and one of the other MMSYSERR_ error 
// codes if there are other errors encountered in opening the 
// specified waveform-audio device. 
 
MMRESULT IsFormatSupported(LPWAVEFORMATEX pwfx, UINT uDeviceID) 
{ 
    return (waveOutOpen( 
        NULL,                 // ptr can be NULL for query 
        uDeviceID,            // the device identifier 
        pwfx,                 // defines requested format 
        NULL,                 // no callback 
        NULL,                 // no instance data 
        WAVE_FORMAT_QUERY));  // query only, do not open device 
} 

This technique for determining nonstandard format support also applies to waveform-audio input devices. The only difference is that the waveInOpen function is used in place of waveOutOpen to query for format support.

To determine whether a particular waveform-audio data format is supported by any of the waveform-audio devices in a system, use the technique illustrated in the previous example, but specify the WAVE_MAPPER constant for the uDeviceID parameter.