Asio4all

[Hammer Bart]

Okay, first of all, to everyone who has professional recording gear: move on to another thread, this is for people who are starting with home recording.

In case you too have tried to record or monitor direct with a soundcard that is unsuited for anything other than playing windows sounds, you may have noticed rediculous latency. We all know that to solve this, we need a proper soundcard with ASIO drivers.

Anyway, I had well over a second of latency on an old pc with an onboard AC97 thingy -calling it a soundcard is definitely giving it too much credit-.
A friend of mine suggested I'd try the ASIO4ALL driver by Micheal Tippach.
http://www.asio4all.com/
It works with every soundcard I think. On my crappy AC97 system, after some minor tweaking with the settings, it brought latency back from something like 1-2 seconds to something very very hard to even notice. I'm guessing it's less than 10 miliseconds. It's totally useable now. Even though my system is still a pile of junk, I think it's quite a drastic improvement. Plus, the little 'control panel' that comes with the driver is hilarious. Click Einstein for advanced settings or click Bush for simple settings And if an audio device has a problem that is beyond logic, a little 'female' sign is displayed. Big up to mr Tippach, who made his driver shareware and even tells people to donate to charity rather than to him.

Hope this may help some of the broke and new home producers, have fun.

 

[Wadi]

Yeah. The driver works well for creative soundcards too.

But I only managed to get 10ms latency for my system (same latency when I used M-Audio Quattro). I suppose CPU speed and ram plays a part in getting the lowest latency too .

But hey, for a cheap card,Asio4All is really a boost!!

 

[_RiseInside_]

so how does it compare with the kx drivers ?

is it worth trying ?

 

[Ermz]

I'm using Creative ASIO drivers, which came with my soundcard. Would it be worthwhile to change to one of these 3rd party sets?

 

[Wadi]

so how does it compare with the kx drivers ?

is it worth trying ?

Isnt it the same as ASIO4ALL? Anyway, you should be able to uninstall the driver effortlessly if you find it not suitable for your appz. As for ASI4ALL, you dont event need to uninstall any previously installed drivers.

And nope, I havent tried KXDrivers yet.

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

I'll give it a whirl later... I have things to record.

 

[Wadi]

I'm using Creative ASIO drivers, which came with my soundcard. Would it be worthwhile to change to one of these 3rd party sets?

There's no harm trying. But, if its not broken dont fix it.

 

[Hammer Bart]

If you already have good ASIO drivers that came with your soundcard then I guess you could stick with those and do fine. If you try the asio4all nothing scary will happen, in the list of asiodrivers that your host application shows asio4all is added to the drivers you already have. I use cubase SX and switching drivers within cubase is a piece of cake.

Quote from the ASIO4ALL FAQ:
"Q: Is this safe?

A: ASIO4ALL is a user mode component that is neither running nor even being loaded unless you start an ASIO host application. It does not overwrite/replace anything in your system except previous versions of itself. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that it crashes, in which case you simply uninstall and forget about it."

Edit: the driver comes with a small manual which very clearly tells you which parameters in the control panel do what and how to get the lowest latency.
For me, 4 kernels and an asio buffer size of about 280 seems to work well. One or two minutes of experimenting with the asio buffer size and you should be set as well.