Notes by ff123
I was interested in finding out if the Disk Writer plugin within Winamp was producing the same bitstream as the waveOut or DirectSound plugins. To make this test, I downloaded an evaluation copy of Total Recorder v2.2, which allows me to capture up to 40 seconds of a bitstream before it makes its way to the sound card driver.
I used Winamp 2.666, which includes the Disk Writer v1.0, waveOut v2.02, and DirectSound v0.96 output plugins. My plan was to encode a short (32 second) sample to mp3, and then to produce three .wav files, one directly using Disk Writer, and the other two using Total Recorder to capture the bitstreams of the waveOut and DirectSound plugins.
I used the Nullsoft MPEG audio decoder v2.666 as the input plugin.
The Disk Writer and waveOut plugins produced identical bitstreams as compared by using the DOS file compare program (binary option).
However, when I tried to use Total Recorder to capture the DirectSound bitstream, I got garbled sound, which normally doesn't occur. Total Recorder thus appears to be incompatible with the DirectSound plugin in Winamp, and as such I can't perform a bit-comparison of this plugin against the other two. The help file for Total Recorder acknowledges Direct Sound conflicts as a problem it has with some playback programs.