How to provide a HWND to DirectSound SetCooperativeLevel in a console program?

Question

I'm writing a console program that uses DirectSound API to render some audio data. I stumbled on a curious problem when following the DirectSound Programming Guide (from Microsoft). According to the documentation :

After creating a device object, you must set the cooperative level for the device by using the IDirectSound8::SetCooperativeLevel method. Unless you do this, no sounds will be heard.

The problem is that I'm writing a console program, and SetCooperativeLevel requires a HWND as a first argument. I don't have any HWND to deal with in the console program. I tried providing a null pointer but it failed with a DSERR_INVALIDPARAM error code.

What HWND value should be provided to IDirectSound8::SetCooperativeLevel in a console program ? The audio part of the program is planned to be built as a shared library, so it has little to no knowledge of the "outside" program.

Thanks for any advice !

Note : I know that there is a somewhat better solution for simply rendering audio, like using SDL, OpenAL, SFML (based on OpenAL), but for my current project DirectSound is enforced.

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Edit : I found a message from a Microsoft engineer that removes doubts about using the desktop window or the console window as a HWND for SetCooperativeLevel when creating GLOBAL_FOCUS buffers.

Answer 1

Although I have not tested this myself, you may have some success creating a hidden window and passing its HWND to the SetCooperativeLevel method. SetCooperativeLevel uses this hwnd to determine when your application has input focus; therefore, if you select a cooperative level where the input focus doesn't matter (eg, DSSCL_NORMAL), a hidden window (which will never receive input focus) should be fine.

Answer 2

you can use this ::GetDesktopWindow().