   Midi, DLS, Soundfonts, etc
  So here's the deal.  I'm making a game, and for sound effects, I'm developing DLS instrument files for playing the sound effects.  My question is, is DirectMusic utilizing hardware or software rendering for putting these sound effect together.  Obviously, I don't want a huge processor load from sound effects if it is all software rendered, so I'm hoping it is hardware rendered.  Also, I was curious if soundfonts was easier/better to use for in-game sound effects for this purpose.  Any help is appreciated, thanks!   
  No, it's probably not easier/better.Using plain MIDI and DLS files is probably not the best solution.  It requires a sound card that has pretty good support for that, and those are becoming rarer in consumer devices.  Seriously old sound cards, or extremely cheap cards, are just ADC/DAC devices.  They convert the audio signal into binary, and vice versa.  Anything halfway modern is going to do some of the audio mixing itself.  Old cards had their own RAM and mixed it on the card, since the system bus is slow.  PCI cards generally use system RAM for it.Newer cards have WDM drivers.  There is a sound mixer in the kernel (kmixer) that converts all sounds to be played into a common format, and sends it using WDM to the hardware which then does the actual mixing and playing.  It is extremely fast.  Any sounds you play are going to go through this eventually, so you might as well take advantage of that fact and make life easy on yourself.Your best bet is to use whatever sound effect format is easiest to code and use it.  DirectSound can handle wav, wma, mp3, and even ogg if you use the proper libraries.  Just open the files and play it.  The kernel will convert it, resample it, mix it, and do whatever else is needed in the most optimal fashion available.frob.   ;  I'm not sure what you mean by MIDI and DLS requiring a sound card that supports it, and it's becoming rarer in consumer devices.  By consumer devices, do you mean computers?  That is the only thing I am developing this game for.  Also, it would seem that as time goes on, more and more cards would support more types of technology, not the other way around.  I know that this isn't always the case, but with the success of DLS technology, it seems that it would be.  Also, you said that it required the use of such a card, but so far I've found that it has no problem being software rendered... Is there a problem with this that you know of?It seems that using DirectMusic would be just as fast as using DirectSound though, wouldn't it?  I'm thinking I will use something else for sound effects at this point, but still looking at using DLS files and DirectMusic for playing the music.  I wouldn't use DLS to play each note, but rather, to play parts.  So I would record my music, convert each part or style of it into mp3, and then place each part of it using notes in a DLS file.  Then, I can call each file as a note, and dynamically switch between them, using crossfading or whatever other techniques I need to.Also, am I under the correct understanding that both DirectSound and DirectMusic use the sound card if it is supported, or the processor if it is not?  I think that the load on the processer is not too much to handle with other game stuff happening as well (at 16 voices, software rendered, it takes up a whole 2% on a pII 266).Thanks for your time, I appreciate you responding.   