Stupid question about ASIO Drivers

[mbouteneff]

Alright, I just purchased an M-Audio Delta 1010LT card as well as Sonar. The soundcard manual talks about enabling ASIO drivers for your software application. At this point, all I know about ASIO is that is stands for Audio Stream Input/Output. Can someone briefly explain to me what the benefit of using them is, and how I can tell if it's desirable to use them instead of the "default setup" in Sonar?

Thanks, much appreciated!

-M

[drstawl]

It's supposed to reduce latency in the multitrack environment.

Steinberg developed it and they make some mighty tight SW.
Give it a try! If you have the hardware (and the Software) and the drivers to support it there is no good reason to NOT try it!

[mbouteneff]

Hey, sounds good -- thanks drstawl!

This is my first dive into recording, so I won't have a frame of reference to compare against, but you're right -- Why not? I'll trust Steinberg.

Thanks! (enabling drivers as I type)


...now if I could just figure out how to get the MIDI signal from my DGX202 keyboard to get through...I love this stuff!

[mbouteneff]

Okay, I enabled the ASIO drivers in Sonar. When I did so, other options were also listed:

default
WDM/KS
ASIO
MME (32-bit)

I went with ASIO. Let me know if I should consider the others -- thanks again!

[AlChuck]

Check in the Cakewalk forum on this issue. I know that SONAR now supports ASIO drivers but that's a new development, so perhaps their support for WDM drivers is better. It probably also varies on a device-by-device basis -- some products might have more mature ASIO drivers available than WDM, some vice-versa.

[mbouteneff]

I'll check - thanks for the advice.

[baba]

Hi,

I have and use Sonar Producer 3.1 with kX Project ASIO on an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard.

The advantage of ASIO, for one, it should play back, with effects on ( called live input, input monitoring, etc. ) at very low latency. I have a setting of 5.33 Ms @48000/16 bit. This is nearly realtime and makes something like amp sims ( Revalver ) and other effects respond at a speed that works while keeping time to a click track or drum, as you play your instrument.

The general rule of what works best for low latency is ASIO = very fast, WDM = quite fast ( I can get 10 Ms in Sonar with kX wdm ), and last MME, which I never use.

I use WDM quite often for large projects that don't require 'live input' at 24/96 but my ASIO driver is limited to 16/48. kX Project is developing ASIO 24/96 driver for Audigy 2 cards, so I will probably use ASIO for all programs soon.

cheers,
baba