Best Sound Card Drivers

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elil

New member
Can anybody tell me the difference between MME, WDM, ASIO, and Direct Audio? I wanted to know which one might be able to give me better latency, quality, etc. I need to run up to 8 track simultaneous recording, and often have everything playing back while doing overdubs.

I run a custom built PC w/ an AMD Athalon 2600, 512MB Ram, 7200rpm HD, Delta 1010LT (recording + playback), Soundblaster Live 5.1 (also for playback), and XP Pro.

I was using the Ableton Live software that came with the card, but it gave out after 10 days (apparently it was only a demo version) and I was thinking of going with Sonar 3. I'm pretty familiar w/ ProTools and was told this is probably the most similar as far as features. Any other reccomendations are welcome.

-Adam
 
elil said:
Can anybody tell me the difference between MME, WDM, ASIO, and Direct Audio? I wanted to know which one might be able to give me better latency, quality, etc. I need to run up to 8 track simultaneous recording, and often have everything playing back while doing overdubs.

I run a custom built PC w/ an AMD Athalon 2600, 512MB Ram, 7200rpm HD, Delta 1010LT (recording + playback), Soundblaster Live 5.1 (also for playback), and XP Pro.

I was using the Ableton Live software that came with the card, but it gave out after 10 days (apparently it was only a demo version) and I was thinking of going with Sonar 3. I'm pretty familiar w/ ProTools and was told this is probably the most similar as far as features. Any other reccomendations are welcome.

-Adam
Click to expand...

MME is an older Microsoft specification for Windows drivers. WDM is a newer MS specification, which allows for more direct communication between Windows and various hardware devices. This lowers latency and therefore provides better performance

ASIO is a Steinberg driver spec which was written a few years back to get around some of the limitations in the MS MME spec.

You can eliminate MME from your selection as this is old technology. As for which to choose from between ASIO and WDM, it really depends on the specific piece of hardware, how well the manufacturer wrote the drivers, and what specific software you plan on running. For example, Sonar versions prior to 2.2 did not support ASIO drivers. Therefore your ONLY choice for good performance would have been WDM. Versions 2.2 and forward support both WDM and ASIO (and MME fwiw).

Delta has pretty good WDM and ASIO drivers. My suggestion would be to try both with your specific rig and see which gives you better performance.
 
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