I wanted to use DirectMusic in my game, but it's not in the June 2010 SDK, so I thought that I had to use DirectSound. Then I saw the XAudio2.h header in the SDK's include folder and found that XAudio2 is the replacement for DirectSound. Both are low-level. During my research I stumbled across the XACT API, but can't find a good explanation on it. Is XACT to XAudio2 what DirectMusic was to DirectSound? By which I mean, is the XACT API a high-level, easier-to-use API for playing sounds that abstracts away the details of XAudio2? If not, what is it?