ASIO4ALL is a hardware independent low latency ASIO driver for WDM audio devices. It uses WDM Kernel-Streaming and sometimes even more sophisticated methods to achieve its objectives. ASIO4ALL is a freeware universal audio driver for Windows which supports ASIO. If your audio interface already has a native ASIO driver, we recommend to use that. However, if your interface does not come with a native ASIO driver, or if you are experiencing issues using the current driver then you can use ASIO4ALL instead.
How to download and install ASIO4ALL. To begin, download the latest ASIO4ALL driver from the ASIO4ALL website. Next, open your Downloads folder and run the installer. Take a look at the instructions and video below to install ASIO4ALL. ASIO4ALL now aware of Intel(R) SST and working around several issues; Refactoring WaveRT implementation for both, pull mode and polling. Fix an issue that in 64 bit mode ASIO4ALL would not use the position register, but rather the legacy mechanism; Improve support for WaveRT packet devices. USB audio class 2.0 devices should work much better now.
Last reviewed: 2021/03/12
Table Of Contents
- Introduction
- Getting started
- Setting up your audio software
- Basic configuration
- WDM Device List
- ASIO Buffer Size
- Load default settings
- Switch to advanced mode
- Advanced configuration
- Device aggregation
- Latency Compensation
- Hardware Buffer on/off
- Kernel Buffers/Buffer Offset
- Allow Pull Mode (WaveRT)
- Always Resample 44.1<->48 kHz
- Force WDM driver to 16 Bit
- Common usage cases optimizations
- Playing software synths live
- Computer as effects processor
- General purpose sequencer setup
- Latency does not matter a lot
- Troubleshooting
- ASIO4ALL not visible in host audio configuration menu
- Audio device flagged as “Unavailable” or “Beyond Logic” even though it is not in use elsewhere
- Cannot play sound from another application when ASIO4ALL is active
- Changes made in the control panel do not propagate between different audio applications
- Latencies displayed by the host application do not match the values that would result from the ASIO buffer size
Introduction
Welcome to ASIO4ALL! This manual enables you to make the most of your ASIO4ALL installation, especially as it comes to the advanced features newly introduced in this Version of ASIO4ALL.
In order to achieve the best possible results with ASIO4ALL on a very old computer, it is recommended that your computer is configured accordingly:
- When running an old version of Windows, set the power scheme to “Always On” (XP) or “High Performance” (Vista) in order to turn off Processor P-State switching! Advanced: Modify an existing power scheme so as to not switch CPU speed, because other power settings are not that critical.
- Turn off system sounds! While e.g. the Windows logon sound certainly will not be a problem, sound effects in response to button clicks, notifications etc. will mean that for the time they play, ASIO4ALL may be unable to initialize the audio device.
Note: Fortunately these issues are less important, should you be using a version of Windows that is less than 10 years old! You should not need to re-configure you system, then.
For updates, help and further information, please visit
Asio4all Pro Tools
Getting Started
Asio4all
Setting up your audio software
In order to make use of ASIO4ALL, you need to configure your audio software accordingly. How you would do this depends on your particular software application. Generally, you would always enter the audio configuration menu and select ASIO -> ASIO4ALL v2.
There now should be a button to launch the ASIO control panel. How this button is labeled depends on your particular software. Once you press this button, the ASIO4ALL control panel should appear. Please consult the manual of your audio software for further assistance, if necessary!
There is, of course, a much easier way for accessing the ASIO control panel at any time. This mechanism has been around for almost 15 years now – with no known compatibility issues: Simply launch the control panel by clicking on the ASIO4ALL status icon in the System Tray area!The tray icon will become visible whenever an application initializes the ASIO4ALL driver. If there is no tray icon, your audio application is not currently using the ASIO4ALL driver. You can disable balloon notifications by switching to “Advanced” mode in the ASIO4ALL control panel.
Changes made in the control may not have an effect until you restart the audio application. Once you made it into the ASIO4ALL control panel – one way or the other – you can now proceed with some basic configuration.
Basic configuration
WDM Device List
This is the list of audio devices found in your system. Highlight the device that you want to make changes to.
Note: All parameter changes always only apply to the device currently highlighted!Activate the device you want to use by clicking on the button next to the device name! In the picture above, the Realtek High Definition Audio device would be enabled while all others are not.
The current state of each device is shown as a small icon on its associated button. It can be either of these:
ASIO Buffer Size
Load default settings
Switch to advanced mode
Advanced configuration
Once the control panel has been switched to advanced mode, things begin to look a little more complicated. The device list is now expandable and you can enable more than one item at a time.
Device aggregation
Using the button next to each entry, you can now selectively enable/disable each particular item in the device list. This way, you can also create multi-device-setups (“aggregate devices”) .
Multi-device-setups require that all the devices involved are running from the same clock source. You can achieve this by daisy-chaining devices via S/PDIF etc. On-board devices usually share a common clock source.
USB devices come in three flavors in this regard:
- Synchronous
- Asynchronous
- Adaptive
Only synchronous devices will adjust their audio clock to the USB clock of the computer and hence are likely to have no problems working together with other devices in the same setup. Ironically, these will be the cheapest devices on the market, as they use chips that do not even need a crystal for audio clocking.
Here is how to obtain this information about any USB audio device:Latency Compensation
Since ASIO4ALL does not have sufficient knowledge of the underlying hardware/driver architecture, it can only guess the actual latencies involved. With these sliders you can compensate for the latencies unknown to ASIO4ALL such that recordings in your sequencer Software are properly aligned with the rest.Note: In multi-device-setups the largest respective value of all devices will be used. Therefore, if different devices have different inherent latencies, audio placement will not be accurate for some devices!Hardware Buffer on/off
Note: For WaveRT drivers, this box is labeled “Allow Pull Mode (WaveRT)” instead!Enables the hardware buffer for the highlighted device. This only works for so called “WavePCI” miniports, as other types of WDM drivers do not usually allow direct access to the hardware buffer. Adjustment for best hardware buffer performance involves the “ASIO Buffer Size” slider and the “Buffer Offset” slider (see below). Hardware buffering works best for rather small ASIO buffer sizes. Try something between 128 and 256 samples as a starter! The biggest advantage of using the hardware buffer is that this method uses a lot less CPU. In addition, it may be possible to decrease latencies even further.In multi-device-setups, it is possible to mix Hardware-buffered devices with devices that are not. This, however, is not particularly recommended!With Envy24-based PCI-sound cards, there may be an option in your sound card control panel that reads “DMA Buffer Transfer Latency” (Seen with Terratec products) or similar. You should set this to the lowest possible value, e.g. “1ms” for best results.Note: If hardware buffering is not supported by a particular audio device, there will be an additional latency of a couple hundred milliseconds, which is clearly audible.Kernel Buffers/Buffer Offset
If hardware buffering is disabled, this control lets you add up to two more buffers to be queued for audio output. Each additional buffer increases the output latency of the device by the time it takes to play one buffer.Therefore, the initial setting of “2” should only be changed on less powerful machines, where reasonably small ASIO buffer sizes cannot be achieved with the default setting.If hardware buffering is enabled, this control determines the amount of clearance (in ms) between where ASIO4ALL will insert data into/read data from the hardware buffer, and the position where ASIO4ALL currently thinks the hardware read/write position is.Allow Pull Mode (WaveRT)
Note: These controls have no effect for WaveRT packet devices. Packet devices do not support polling – and always will use event mode. Therefore, the entire “Options” section will be hidden for packet devices. This is not a bug!There are two basic access methods for a WaveRT device, “pull-mode” (also called “event-mode”) and “push-mode” (also called “polling mode”).If this box is left unchecked, ASIO4ALL will not use “pull-mode”, otherwise it will use it whenever possible. The default mode will be polling, though, because it is the most compatible one. Especially for small ASIO buffer sizes and those that are not multiples of “32”, WDM drivers may refuse to support Event Mode buffer creation. In that case, ASIO4ALL will revert to polling instead, which you may not even notice.The “Buffer Offset” only matters when polling is used. The default is now at 1ms, which should work in most cases. You may also try 0ms, which results in even less latency. As a general rule: Higher settings increase latency and stability, lower settings have the adverse effect. Thus, this value should be as close to zero as possible.Always Resample 44.1<->48 kHz
ASIO4ALL can do real time resampling of 44.1 kHz audio to/from 48 kHz. Resampling will automatically take place whenever ASIO4ALL is opened for 44.1 kHz and the WDM driver does not support this sample rate.There may, however, be instances in which case an audio device will support 44.1 kHz only by resampling internally. More often than not, however, this resampling quality is extremely poor and/or prone to stability issues. To work around this, you can enable this option.Force WDM driver to 16 Bit
This option only has an effect if the supported bit depth of the WDM driver is larger than 16, but less than 24. Some devices report e.g. 20 Bits resolution but cannot actually be opened for more than 16 Bits resolution. Should this be the case on your system, this option provides a workaround. Originally, this was introduced as a workaround for an issue with the SigmaTel AC97 WDM driver.Common usage cases optimizations
Playing software synths live
In this scenario, you do not need audio inputs. Therefore, you best disable them all, which normally will provide you with a better stability at very small ASIO buffer sizes, or allow smaller buffer sizes in the first place. Further, you should also disable all audio outputs you do not really need. To disable channels, use the advanced control panel, expand the items in the WDM device list and disable everything you do not want to use in this setup!Computer as effects processor
Obviously, in this scenario you do need inputs. But, as always, you should disable all channels you do not want to use. Disable 44.1KHz resampling if it is not really necessary!General purpose sequencer setup
Normally it matters most that you do not get any dropouts even when the CPU load goes through the roof. Thus, it is recommended that you relax the latency requirements a little and work with an ASIO buffer size that feels comfortable with all your favorite VST plugins active. This especially applies when you are recording audio, in which case dropouts are a little worse than just moderately annoying. If your sequencer provides latency compensation, you probably want to check that recorded audio is aligned properly, and, if not, make the necessary adjustments in the “Latency Compensation” section in the advanced settings dialog.Latency does not matter a lot
In certain configurations, ASIO4ALL allows for bit transparent audio where the Windows driver stack does not. Hence, audiophiles prefer ASIO output over DirectSound or MME, which most likely does mangle audio data. In these scenarios, latency is of little concern and audio input is not asked for. Naturally, you would make sure that all inputs are disabled, set the ASIO buffer size to the maximum and be happy!Troubleshooting
Since ASIO4ALL presents itself to the audio software as a single ASIO driver, but due to its various configuration options, can act like a chameleon, there are numerous things that can go wrong without ASIO4ALL being at fault. Most notably, if you change the device setup in the ASIO4ALL control panel, the number of available input and output channels is likely to change, as well as the names of the channels that are seen by the host application. Therefore, it is always advisable to restart your audio host application after any change in the audio device setup whenever you find that the particular application does not appear to be able to handle these kinds of changes on the fly.
More potential problems and possible solutions:
ASIO4ALL not visible in host audio configuration menu
There are two possible reasons for this: Either your audio application does not support ASIO or you installed ASIO4ALL v2 as an underprivileged user. In the latter case, please log on as Administrator and install ASIO4ALL v2 again. Once successfully installed, ASIO4ALL v2 should not require Administrator privileges anymore in order to run.Audio device flagged as “Unavailable” or “Beyond Logic” even though it is not in use elsewhere
You want to make sure the “MS GS Software Wavetable Synth” or anything by a similar name is not enabled anywhere in you MIDI setup.Another reason often observed may be a browser window open, which had e.g. a Youtube-Video running. It is not necessary that the video still runs – it still may be blocking your audio device.If this can be ruled out, try to restart the audio host application. Sometimes, when switching from another driver to ASIO4ALL v2, the previous driver will not release the audio device in time.If the device is an USB/PCMCIA/FireWire device, close the ASIO4ALL control panel, unplug the device, plug it in again and re-open the ASIO4ALL control panel.Cannot play sound from another application when ASIO4ALL is active
This by design. As close to the hardware as possible means that all the software mixing provided by Windows will be bypassed. Without any software mixing – and the associated latency and bit mangling – you are stuck with the hardware mixing capabilities of your audio device. Most of the time, there simply are no hardware mixing capabilities at all.Changes made in the control panel do not propagate between different audio applications
Neither do they propagate between different users! This is not a bug, but a feature! ASIO4ALL v2 stores settings per host application/per user! This makes it possible to have several instances of ASIO4ALL run at the same time for as long as they do not try to use the same piece of audio hardware exclusively.Latencies displayed by the host application do not match the values that would result from the ASIO buffer size
ASIO4ALL supports the latency compensation features of ASIO hosts that perform latency compensation. This support is still a bit under development and will be improved as time passes. The values reported here are not just the latencies ASIO4ALL adds to the audio stream, but rather the represent the whole of driver/OS/hardware inherent latencies. If the guess was correct, that is…Imprint
Universal ASIO driver
The primary use of Asio4All today is to creating music on your PC when your built-in drivers just won’t cut it. However, its applications extend beyond that.
Free and universal
Asio4All is a free, hardware-independent, low-latency universal Asio driver for WDM-supported devices and software.
Asio drivers bypass Windows mixer to make audio output fast and reliable. However, not everybody has such a driver. In that case, Asio4All serves as an intermediary, connecting your audio software to your sound card.
The installation is simple. After your download, you just need to access DAW preferences and choose this program as the driver.
Primarily, Asio4All allows FL Studio to run on low latency, adding to the speed. You'll grant it exclusive access to the audio driver, and it will replace some of its functions and add some new features.
Asio4allv
This program acts as an emulator for Asio drivers, so you can use any digital audio workstation without the need for an external audio card. It's ideal for those starting their home studio.
Where can you run this program?
Asio4All is only available for Windows devices with operating system versions Vista, 7, 8, and 10.
Is there a better alternative?
Yes. Asio4All is great, but it hijacks your audio and doesn’t let you play other audio output. If you’re on a Mac, try Soundflower. For Windows, FL Asio is a good option.
Our take
While it does come with its share of issues, Asio4All boasts a fantastic range of compatibility, making it a logical go-to choice.
Should you download it?
Yes, especially if you want to create music on your PC and your custom driver isn’t sufficient.
Highs
- Universal audio driver
- Works with all WDM-supported audio devices
- Low latency
- Independent software
Lows
- Difficult to use
- Sometimes displays verification errors
ASIO4ALLfor Windows
2.9