asio4all drivers - recommended?

ajmedway · Post by **ajmedway** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 11:43 am

Hi to all again - I've spoken to the vendor of my Numark DJ IO and said that it doesn't work with Ableton 7 (latest) and latest vista drivers for the product (intolerable latency/audio dropouts issue), but they have refused to refund me!

But he did recommend that I download ASIO4ALL drivers, which he claims are known to make the product work with Ableton.

Is this a wise move to use ASIO4ALL? What's the crack with these drivers?

see the light · Post by **see the light** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 11:47 am

Definatly use these drivers - PC only though

It universally controls all soundcards within your PC, you'll have the option to activate or deactivate any of the I/O's of your chosen soundcards

ajmedway · Post by **ajmedway** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 11:52 am

see the light wrote:Definatly use these drivers - PC only though

It universally controls all soundcards within your PC, you'll have the option to activate or deactivate any of the I/O's of your chosen soundcards

Are they good for low latency... they chap said he had the Numark DJ IO working in ableton with 1ms latency! Apparently better than the bundled Numark DJ IO ASIO drivers.

Plausible? Do a lot of people use these ASIO4ALL drivers over the manufacturer-specific ones?

Szuumm · Post by **Szuumm** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 12:03 pm

I used them a while back on my laptop before I got a 'proper' soundcard to achieve usable latencies. I found them pretty good, but they did seem to use a lot of extra system resources.

This was a couple of years ago though, so a newer/more powerful computer will most likely not have any issues.

ciw · Post by **ciw** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 12:22 pm

Definitely try asio4all, they're good.

Was your interface meant to be vista compatible? Did it say so on the box? If so they can't refuse to refund you under uk law; any fault which develops within six months of purchase is assumed to have been a fault when the item was purchased and you can take it back.

If it didn't say it was vista compatible... what the feck are you doing running vista?! install xp again if you want your audio to work

see the light · Post by **see the light** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 12:25 pm

ajmedway wrote:
see the light wrote:Definatly use these drivers - PC only though

It universally controls all soundcards within your PC, you'll have the option to activate or deactivate any of the I/O's of your chosen soundcards
Are they good for low latency... they chap said he had the Numark DJ IO working in ableton with 1ms latency! Apparently better than the bundled Numark DJ IO ASIO drivers.

Plausible? Do a lot of people use these ASIO4ALL drivers over the manufacturer-specific ones?

ASIO4ALL is turning into a bit of a standard install for home producers/laptop DJs - I swear by them, i run my latency around 4ms which is more than enough for what i do.

Doesn't really strech my system too much...i'm on 1.5gig of ram, 1.67 dual core, Tascam 144us soundcard and the ASIO4ALL drivers have served me much better than Tascams drivers.

If the chap at Numark is recommending them over his product then i would certainly take his word for it

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:11 pm

I used Asio4all to turn a £5 Creative Labs 5.1 soundcard into a 3 out put audio interface (2 channels + 1 PFL/Cue).

Worked flawlessly. After a while I got "Y" splitters and switched the 2 stereo outs into 4 mono outs... Still worked flawlessly.

Perfect for DJ'ing on a budget.

ajmedway · Post by **ajmedway** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 4:22 pm

ciw wrote:If it didn't say it was vista compatible... what the feck are you doing running vista?! install xp again if you want your audio to work

Yes, it is Vista compatible and has vista drivers, which of course I am using

Which version of ASIO4ALL should I download? The latest beta or any particular recommendations?

ajmedway · Post by **ajmedway** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 4:24 pm

It sounds too good to be true!

Why on earth can't these manufacturers bundle drivers that equal this free, open source asio4all stuff?

jhartford · Post by **jhartford** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:32 pm

ajmedway wrote:It sounds too good to be true!

Why on earth can't these manufacturers bundle drivers that equal this free, open source asio4all stuff?

I don't know, but check it on your sound card - every sound card I've checked on so far has gotten much faster latency times with ASIO4ALL than the bundled driver.

In my live setup I run 8 ins and 8 outs and need the latency as low as possible so i use ASIO4ALL with my Alesis IO-26. I wanted to get a presonus fierstudio (cause i actually needed the extra 2 analogue outs and I wanted to rack mount my gear) and the only reason I didn't get it was cause the presonus doesn't allow ASIO4ALL to access more than 2 stereo outs (your sound card has to support multichannel WDM output). I tested the presonus with ASIO4ALL though and aside from the 2 channel thing, it was significantly faster than the default drivers (it could run smoothly on my machine at 64 samples buffer with a very taxing set, while the default driver could only manage 192 samples).

What's also interesting is I'm on a macbook pro and I can get faster performance running XP with ASIO4ALL than i can with core audio... its really messed up. but awesome.

it'd be interesting to see if everyone else has the same experience on their sound cards? Anyone not able to get better performance by running ASIO4ALL?

ReverendZed · Post by **ReverendZed** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 8:23 pm

ajmedway wrote:It sounds too good to be true!

Why on earth can't these manufacturers bundle drivers that equal this free, open source asio4all stuff?

Because programmers that code drivers think they're fucking brilliant, that no one has ever been as fucking brilliant as they are, and that the roses coming out of their ass are the best smelling, most perfect fucking roses ever EVAR.

It would seem intuitive for a manufacturer to want their product to work consistently each and every time, and many of them will direct customers to ASIO4ALL when there's a problem. However, ASIO4ALL is not GPL open source - it is free. It contains technology that interacts with code belonging to Windows and Steinberg and thus cannot be made available for other manufacturers to use as bare-bones alternative drivers. Since every audio device is different, the bells and whistles that make them unique don't function - all you get is the best audio quality the hardware itself is capable of.

That and vaginas.

Also, pudding.

ajmedway · Post by **ajmedway** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 7:40 am

UPDATE: Got ASIO4ALL running my sound card smoothly now with the Numark DJ IO, but the lowest buffer I can succeed with is 512 samples (giving a 12ms latency).

Whats settings are recommended in ASIO4ALL control panel to throttle this for even lower latency?

Stace · Post by **Stace** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 10:11 am

jhartford wrote: I wanted to get a presonus fierstudio (cause i actually needed the extra 2 analogue outs and I wanted to rack mount my gear) and the only reason I didn't get it was cause the presonus doesn't allow ASIO4ALL to access more than 2 stereo outs (your sound card has to support multichannel WDM output).

My FS came with Presonus ASIO.

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 1:28 pm

ReverendZed wrote:That and vaginas.

Also, pudding.

I like you. You're funny..!

jamief · Post by **jamief** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 1:35 pm

Patch wrote:
ReverendZed wrote:That and vaginas.

Also, pudding.
I like you. You're funny..!

Patch can i ask you a personal question ?