ASIO4ALL Official Home

Universal Windows ASIO Driver

Overview

What started as a bedroom project in early 2003 – for the sole purpose to get ASIO support for the AC97 on my laptop – has become ASIO4ALL – the universal ASIO driver for WDM audio. Honestly, I did not expect this project to become as popular as it has become (but this popularity would not particularly disappoint me, either 😉

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.

In order to use ASIO4ALL, you need:

  • A WDM-compatible operating system, (any Windows OS since Win98SE)
  • A WDM-driver for your audio hardware, whereas all audio device drivers are WDM drivers, except sometimes under Win98SE/WinME.
  • A couple minutes of your time and a little bit of luck.

What ASIO4ALL will NOT do:

  • Replace your existing sound card drivers or mess with them in any way.
  • Install any kernel mode components that could potentially affect the stability of your system.
  • “Overclock”, or otherwise operate your audio hardware in ways that could potentially be harmful and/or void your warranty, except, of course, in cases where the manufacturer of your hardware has specifically stated that the use of ASIO4ALL would void your warranty indeed.

ASIO4ALL is free for the end user. Commercial exploitation (resale/bundling…), however, is restricted.

  • Device aggregation

    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… more

  • Latency Compensation

    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… more

  • Hardware Buffer on/off

    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… more