im trying to put support for multithreading in a my audio code. I'm doing this so i can seperate the streaming in to its own thread. now the problem i've come across is this: i have a method called Stop which acquires a semaphore reference and release once done the same class has an Update method which also acquires a semaphore and releases once done. The problem is this Update method calls Stop in some situations, so then i get a lock up. Would a Mutex fix this problem? if not, whats the recommended way to get around this? some sort of hidden last parameter to Stop which tells it no to acquire/release the semaphore?

A mutex is simply a binary semaphore, where as semaphores in the usual sense can be incremented and decremented multiple times (that is to say, more than one thread can "lock" it at a time).

Do the Stop and Update methods both lock the same mutex? If so, as you said you could have Stop take a boolean parameter specifying whether or not to lock the mutex; Update would pass false since it would already have locked it. Or you could do something like this: