Ableton Forum

ASIO4ALL is a ASIO driver AND a WDM driver.

Since ASIO is just a protocol. and WDM, a framework.

https://sdk.steinberg.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... ion-to-wdm

You can have a ASIO driver built for WDM, of which ASIO4ALL is an example.

WASAPI doesn't provide better performance than ASIO, and has disadvantages with multi-channel and sample-rate (it requires the whole signal path be the same sample-rate and # of channels from beginning to end, without changes, rather inflexible), which is why pretty much all pro audio companies (hardware and software, not only Ableton, but RME, Focusrite, etc...) don't bother with it and provide their own ASIO drivers (or use ASIO4ALL).

pro audio companies.......don't bother with it

Well as it's an inbuilt part of Windows, they don't need to. I've got ASIO kit here that will quite happily use WASAPI, but the manufacturers never advertised the kit as being able to use it.

You've not convinced me about ASIO4ALL. Being an ASIO emulator doesn't make it an actual ASIO driver IMO. If it really was a driver then it wouldn't need to rely on an actual driver (WDM) in order to function.

Under Win10 if I needed to use an on-board PC sound chip which didn't have it's own custom ASIO driver I'd try WASAPI first then ASIO4ALL if WASAPI didn't work well enough.

I actually got good results under Win Vista using WASAPI with an Edirol/Cakewalk interface I had at the time. It out-performed the Roland-supplied ASIO driver.

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