Lifetime and threading

Lifetime and threading

• Dispose controllers and every live device you obtain, including enumerated devices. Use using or try/finally to make cleanup reliable.
• A device owns its child wrappers. Disposing it also cleans up its volume, session, metering, and property resources.
• Dispose subscription tokens to stop listening. Disposing the owning controller, device, or session also removes its registrations.
• Repeated disposal is harmless. Live operations on disposed wrappers throw; detached snapshots require no disposal. Cached device metadata remains readable.
• Property values are managed results; native property memory is cleaned up internally.

Callbacks can arrive concurrently on non-UI threads. Keep handlers fast and thread-safe, and marshal UI work to the UI thread. Do not register, unregister, or dispose audio objects from inside a native event callback; schedule that work elsewhere.

Compatibility and diagnostics

Device enumeration and audio controls use Windows Core Audio. Changing the default device depends on the undocumented policy-configuration interface and may be unsupported on some Windows configurations. COM must be available on the calling thread.

Callback and cleanup failures are reported through System.Diagnostics.Trace. Configure a trace listener when you need diagnostic output.