WDM or ASIO...THAT is the question

  • Thread starter Thread starter austexman
  • Start date Start date
A

austexman

New member
my god...can't i just get to work?!?...apparently not...got a bit to figure out here..

using motu 896hd with sonar 4...896hd supports ASIO and WDM...which one do i frickin' use?!?!

if anyone has the same set up...can you please run me through all of this set up stuff for god's sake...

drivers, buffers, latency, rates, buffers, bits...what a frickin nightmare..
 
I'm affraid that there's no simple answer except: Use the drivers that gives you the best performance. Test and failure will give you the answer.

Some manufactorers make good WDM-drivers and poor ASIO-drivers, some does it the other way around, and some manage to make good drivers of both flavors (and of course some simply make poor drivers).

MoTu should have a pretty good manual, if I remember correctly. Toghether with the Sonar manual you have a winning combination.

For a fairly simple sollution, try this: Use ASIO-drivers. Open the MoTu Control Panel and set the buffers to 128 samples. If you have problems with playback, set them to 256, and so on.
 
thx

yeah...it seems it will definitely be trial and error at this point....so far the ASIO driver has worked more smoothly so i'll stick with that one...

trial and error....t & e...
 
The Biggest advantage with WDM is multiple programs can access the audio driver and the same time while with ASIO its only one at a time.
 
I see a lot of claims that ASIO gives lower latency than the WDM/KS option. With some interface drivers, this may be so, but it's easy to set WDM/KS unfairly.
With ASIO, your latency will be down to the soundcard drivers DMA buffer size. The smaller this is, the lower the latency. However, you can get pops and clicks if this is too low and also greater CPU usage of the driver (and less CPU available for plug-ins!).

WDM/KS depends on Sonars own latency settings AND the soundcard buffer. To get the lowest with WDM...
Set the soundcard buffer to its minimum.
Drag Sonars latency slider to minimum (full left)
Ensure "Buffers in playback queue" is 2
Run the Wave profiler.
You may now adjust the performance by dragging the latency slider higher whenever you please without changing the soundcard buffer again.

Many soundcard drivers are WDM with an ASIO interface (the ASIO "driver" is not entirely seperate software). With these, there really should be very little measurable difference in performance between WDM/KS and ASIO.
Some drivers are not truly WDM standard and are pure ASIO, with adapter code that can provide some functionality for Windows audio and WDM/KS. Performance with these should be obviously better if you use ASIO.

Knowing Motu's track record with Windows drivers, I'd suspect it works better with ASIO.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top