Difference between WDM and AISO?

[quagmire77]

Could someone tell me the difference and advantages or disadvanteges between WDM and AISO drivers?

[dachay2tnr]

Both are driver standards that designate how software communicates with hardware. In our context, it usually refers to how your recording software interacts with your sound card.

WDM is a Microsoft standard that is "relatively" new (a few years old). ASIO has been around longer and was created by Steinberg (Cubase) because the then existing Microsoft standard (MME) was crap for audio work (at least, I assume that is why it was created).

I don't know that there are necessarily advantages of one over the other. It really is more about how well the driver itself has been written. Some sound card manufacturer's have a well-written WDM driver, while others have a good ASIO driver. OTOH some have both, and others have neither.

Best bet (assuming your recording software will recognize either type of driver) is to try both and use the one that gives you the best performance on your machine with your software.

[logan01]

As you may be aware WDM is Windows designed (Windows Driver Module). In fact it was the guys at Cakewalk that made it all happen (or so the story goes). Taking that into account you would hope it would become a stable standard. It is reaching incredibly low latencies and full support as far as automation and effects processing goes. Sonar has moved towards supporting the WDM standard and ditching ASIO. In fact as a result of the whole WDM thing Cakewalk products are being deemed the best for Audio production on PC. With no third party driver issues it is easy to see why this is becoming the case. Bout time windows wrote there own pro audio standard instead of leaving it up to the software producers. Either way, as long as the drivers are written well, it matters not. However, it wouldn't be suprising to see ASIO become a thing of the past now Windows have made the leap.

[manning1]

all this is gradually becoming a non issue because of other technologies coming. when machines were latent it was due to the fact
programmers had to interact with windows api instead directly to the sound card. this caused problems because of the timings involved to process.
just use whatever works and make music.