MultiMedia Soft's new Active Sound Studio Pro 2.1 is an ActiveX control with features that reflect its start as a creation for the games market. Among its recently added features is the ability to change the pitch, tempo, and playback rate of up to four simultaneous sound players.

"Many video games need to perform several sounds at the same time: Our multiplayer feature gives this possibility with the option to add different special effects to each of them," claims Severino Delaurenti, MultiMedia Soft CEO.

Active Sound Studio Pro (formerly Active MP3&WAV Player) plays back MP3, WAV, OGG Vorbis, and the most diffused MOD files, says the company. It plays WMA files and the sound frames of ASF and WMV files if Windows Media Player is present on the target PC. The control's MP3 playback is based on the Xaudio engine. A set of dedicated methods supports playlists and DMO and EAX special effects over playing sounds.

That can be important for certain kinds of applications, such as video games or radio stations' automation software. According to Delaurenti, "[The] WAV format, due to the dimension of the WAV file, is not the ideal solution for redistribution; using compressed formats like MP3 or OGG Vorbis makes it possible to reduce the final overall size of the application setup package."

OGG records at a low bit rate, explains Chris Hoffman, owner of Mystik Media, a developer of multimedia software. "OGG Vorbis is significant; it offers good quality for a lesser file size," says Hoffman, who used Active MP3 DJ Studio Professional for two years, then upgraded to Active Sound Studio a few weeks ago. He says he found it easy to adjust.

Most notable, says Hoffman, are the EAX features in Active Sound Studio, because "You can apply effects that enhance the sound while you're playing." However, he has yet to experiment with the visualizations that represent sounds (similar to those in the Windows Media Player). "I've been using [Active Sound Studio's predecessor] in several projects," says Hoffman, who develops software sold to end users. "It's an all-in-one solution for audio playback that's very convenient to use for all formats, that's intuitive, and is a good solution for me."

Active Sound Studio is royalty free. Prices per 1-2 developer license are Professional $199, Standard $149, and Light $89. The Pro version includes features such as the ability to load sound files from memory, DirectX media object effects (DMO), and EAX effects. A full-featured trial version with a Visual Basic demo application (including source) is available, says the company.