| Originally Posted by Solude ASIO4All is a wrapper. A translator for ASIO to DirectSound. |
| Originally Posted by sgrossklass Oh, and if you can hear a difference between native ASIO and KS, try turning the Wave volume slider to max and compare again. |
| Originally Posted by sgrossklass Not DS, but WDM/KS. |
| Originally Posted by Chri5peed How exactly could two bit-perfect streams be different? I'm no audio technician, but I don't see this would work? |
| Originally Posted by Solude ASIO4All is a wrapper. A translator for ASIO to DirectSound. It let's cards with no ASIO support use ASIO applications by translating the ASIO data into DirectSound format. That's it that's all. If your card has native ASIO support do not use ASIO4All since it isn't an ASIO driver, its a translator. Or in other words if you use ASIO4All to select ASIO Output in Foobar you might as well select DirectSound because that's all ASIO4All is doing... taking ASIO stream and translating it to DS. |
| Originally Posted by Solude WDM = DirectSound KernelStream is still DirectSound but single stream. |
| Many soundcards designed primarily for musicians now arrive with an often bewildering array of driver options, including ME, DirectSound, ASIO, EASI, WDM, and GSIF, so choosing the right one for the job can be confusing. MME (MultiMedia Extensions) were the first Windows driver type to be introduced way back in Windows 3.1, and although they work quite well, normally give high audio latency (the delay between inputting and hearing the sound), which makes them difficult to use when you want to monitor your recordings in real-time. They can work well with some standalone softsynths, and particularly well inside Cakewalk's Sonar. However, if your music application supports ASIO, EASI, or WDM, always choose one of these options in preference if your soundcard supports it. DirectSound drivers are capable of significantly lower latency than MME ones, and are a better choice for softsynths and playback of audio, but don't normally have recording options. Make sure though if you choose DirectSound in a music application that the driver name doesn't have ‘(emulated)' at the end of its name, since this means that no properly written DirectSound drivers have been detected - if you choose an emulated driver it will have extremely poor performance and high latency. Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) format drivers access the soundcard hardware at a lower level, bypassing much of the Windows operating system, and therefore manage much lower latencies, typically 20mS or lower, and sometimes down as low as 2mS! The only disadvantage of ASIO is that only one soundcard can be accessed within applications like Cubase VST. EASI (Enhanced Audio Streaming Interface) is a similar format to ASIO, used by applications such as Logic Audio, and capable of slightly better performance for the few soundcards that seem to support the format. If yours does, you should choose it instead of ASIO. WDM (Win32 Driver Model) was introduced by Microsoft in Windows 98, and was intended to simplify future driver development, by providing a unified design suitable for both consumer and business operating systems, such that one driver would be totally compatible across all future platforms. Another advantage for WDM drivers is that they are better suited for busses like USB and FireWire. It also incorporates a standard low latency wave interface into Windows itself, so that a WDM driver automatically gets both MME and DirectSound support from Windows without needing special code added by each soundcard manufacturer. WDM drivers are now supported by Win 98, ME, 2000, and XP, and if your soundcard has these you should choose them in preference to MME and DirectSound. It's slightly more complex when it comes to ASIO - if your music applications supports both types and you have more than one soundcard installed you may be happier choosing WDM so that you can access them simultaneously, but otherwise the chances are that ASIO is the safest choice, since WDM performance is still not as good in some cases, and in Win 2000 and XP some drivers may also limit you to working with 16-bit files. GSIF (GigaSampler InterFace) drivers are specifically designed to work with the Tascam range of soft samplers. Since they operate a low level, GSIF drivers nearly always provide excellent performance at very low guaranteed latencies of between 6 to 9mS (although a few drives do offer buffer size selection). |
| Originally Posted by jiiteepee As you see on above pictures, all other driver modes but ASIO and WDM/KS (Kernel Streaming, see behind the staudio link (#2) above) (EASI and maybe GSIF too) outputs through kmixer --> Foobar w/ - Asio4All + foo_output_asio and - foo_out_ks (kernel streaming) should both work the way as you wish. jiitee |
