Still confused. ASIO or WDM is better?

[Toddskins]

There have been a few posts on the definitions of drivers, but nobody has given a good layman's common sense answer as to what "we" should be looking for when buying a sound card. Pretty darn obvious that MME is out to sleep now. So....

WDM, ASIO, or, and now also ASIO2?

I've seen comments that go back & forth on this, but without good explanation as to why or which is better for a particular reason.

 

[bennychico11]

I don't know...i personally always think that none of them is "better" than the other. It's all just a language. A language for the drivers to use in order to communicate with hardware. And of course, different companies will use different ones for various reasons. Just like there isn't one set code for computer programing, or one set software program for audio recording. It all depends on what you want to do and what you want to do it with. If you want to use a certain software program because you like it, then you'll have to get the hardware device that can work with that driver.

 

[Jim Y]

A good driver should do all of them well, so you can pick to suit the program.
BTW, the choice is not between WDM or ASIO, but between MME or ASIO. If you want to run Tascams GigaStudio/GigaSampler you also need a driver that handles the GSIF interface too.

E-mu and Digidesign seem to have made ASIO drivers with a limited MME interface tacked on, while M-audio have WDM drivers with MME, ASIO and GSIF etc built in. There is no evidence I know of to suggest that a WDM drivers ASIO has to be inferior to a seperate ASIO only driver.

For the manufacturer, a good WDM driver would appear to be no easy thing to make. WDM (Windows Driver Model) is a recent driver standard from Microsoft, and judging by the problems some manufacturers have had, the documentation they have to work from can't be all that good! Much easier I would think to go for an ASIO only design, which has nothing to do with working with Windows sound system.

As of this moment, the lowest latency is no longer limited by the driver, but the way a pc works. A sound driver DMA buffer of 64 samples gives about 1.5ms delay at 44.1Khz and is as fast as the system will comfortably allow. As far as I know, both standalone ASIO drivers and WDM/ASIO ones can reach this limit in a well optimised machine.

You should certainly obtain a card with at least a good ASIO performance. But if some of your programs cannot use ASIO, a card that has poor or limited MME or no GSIF will be a waste of money for you - especially since there are cards now that do all of them well!