amazing how an audio driver can affect performance

I've been using a Presonus Firebox for three yrs now and have always been using it's latest asio driver and would get what I considered to be very reasonable performance out of the Firebox while using Sonar and Reason in rewire. A situation cropped up the other day where I needed to interface two audio devices, so I had to ditch the Firebox's asio drivers and switch to WDM drivers for each device. I ended up interfacing both devices but there was too much latency. I ended up wrapping the WDM drivers with the ASIO4ALL driver and had success after doing this.


My intentions were to revert back to the Firebox asio drivers when I had no need of the second device but I stayed with the ASIO4ALL driver.

I started new project running 1 virtual drum machine within Sonar, two tracks of audio with some cpu heavy fx plugs on the track inserts, and also had some heavy duty effects plugs on the master bus. I'm rewiring Reason into the mix slowly adding one Reason synth/combi at a time expecting to have an audio dropout at anytime. Well the dropout never happened. I added about 5 more Reason synths and still no dropouts.

All I can say is that the ASIO4ALL driver is blowing my mind right now. You guys know how much virtual instruments and effects processing I use in my tunes. This driver is a huge performance booster for me. I wasn't expecting it to handle audio better than the native Firebox asio drivers, but it looks like it does.

Anyway for those who don't understand the geek speak and have made it this far without falling asleep, there are three basic types of audio drivers for pc based audio hardware. MME, WDM and ASIO drivers. ASIO drivers generally provide the best performance at low latency but you can't use more than 1 interface at a time if you are using asio drivers. WDM and MME drivers allow you to interface multiple audio devices but latecy is usually a problem with these types of drivers. The ASIO4ALL driver is basically a wrapper that takes an audio interface's WDM driver and tricks it into thinking it is an ASIO driver thus giving you better performance at lower latency and allowing you to interface multiple audio devices whose WDM drivers are wrapped with the ASIO4ALL driver.

Yes I'm a geek. Saturday night and I'm all riled up about audio drivers,

All I can say is that the ASIO4ALL driver is blowing my mind right now.

I used this a long time ago when for a reason I can longer recall. It worked well. I wish I could use it now to run multiple devices, but one of the machines in the chain (POD X3 Live) does not have WDM drivers, as far as I know.

I used this a long time ago when for a reason I can longer recall. It worked well. I wish I could use it now to run multiple devices, but one of the machines in the chain (POD X3 Live) does not have WDM drivers, as far as I know.

I thought exactly the same thing with a Korg M3 keyboard. Figured only asio drivers where available and were downloaded to my machine because the only reference I could see anywhere on the computer suggested nothing but asio.

Anyway to make a long story short the newest ASIO4ALL driver download will place a program shortcut in your start menu called ASIO v2 OFFLINE SETTINGS. If you open that program it will give you a list of detected devices on the left window box. (your pod would have to be hooked up via usb before opening) Would just be a matter of clicking the devices on (turning them green) in this panel then changing your audio preferences in Sonar.

Thank you. I shall try this, cause I like to record guitars direct with the POD X3 Live, but it's a crappy playback device. Also, if the POD X3 is plugged in, it Sonar defaults to it, meaning I have to unplug or turn off the X3 every time I want to use Sonar with my default soundcard (Firebox in my office/Roland FA-101 in the garage).

I've installed it, but unfortunately it's not letting me run multiple interfaces at the same time -- not on my Vista machine, anyway.

That's too bad Skully. At least give it a whirl with your Firebox for a few days.
It's definitely handling audio better than my Firebox did.

Sorry to hear. I had difficulties with 2 devices but eventually got them working. Master vs slave time clock setup issues.