KVR Audio

quincy · Post by **quincy** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 5:45 pm

Greetings.

I want to utilise both my soundcards in Renoise so i can preview sounds in one before putting them "Live" out the other, for live performance type stuff.

Unfortunately, despite being able to route any renoise track out of any available soundcard out, when using ASIO4ALL in renoise it doesn't seem to recognise one of my cards(onboard AC97 sound).

Does anybody know alternatives that might be viable? Admittedly i could buy a multi-out card but i'm seeing if there is a cheaper option.

Thanks in advance

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:09 pm

You can't use onboard sound cards with ASIO, they're just not designed for low latency audio. You'll need a better audio interface.

dougsyo · Post by **dougsyo** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:14 pm

bduffy wrote:You can't use onboard sound cards with ASIO, they're just not designed for low latency audio. You'll need a better audio interface.

With ASIO4All, you (sometimes) can - it depends how good the WDM drivers for the card are.

My Dell laptop WDM drivers were pretty sucky with ASIO4All - FLS NEVER stopped crackling (surprisingly, it worked fairly well with Sonar).

OTOH my Sony Vaio does pretty good with ASIO4All, so I only have to hook up the Firebox for "serious music playing".

Doug

Reverse Engineer · Post by **Reverse Engineer** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:15 pm

I use asio4all on my dell inspiron 500m laptop and get 1ms latency. The onboard is a pathetic sigmatel c-major too. I haven't pushed it much, but all the projects i've done on my desktop (which gives me 5ms with kx drivers and a sblive 5.1) all run as they should.

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:20 pm

Well colour me wrong! I've never heard of onboard cards being taken seriously, I didn't know ASIO4ALL was that good. Usually onboard audio is just mentioned as something to disable; I can't imagine using it on my desktop with Cubase, but that's great that people can use them, especially on a laptop.

ohm · Post by **ohm** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:22 pm

I use ASIO4All pretty often when I don't want to carry 'round my RME hammerfall.

I googled for "WDM ASIO" and found this alternative: www.asio2ks.de/

When using these drivers you have to make sure that the microsoft synthesizer is disabled as a midi out device (in your host) because otherwise it will prevent the exclusive access needed by the WDM drivers. Also try different drivers for the audio card.

If you want to play live you probably want to invest in a better interface to get decent sound quality.

jackson · Post by **jackson** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:30 pm

bduffy wrote:Well colour me wrong! I've never heard of onboard cards being taken seriously, I didn't know ASIO4ALL was that good. Usually onboard audio is just mentioned as something to disable; I can't imagine using it on my desktop with Cubase, but that's great that people can use them, especially on a laptop.

It blew me away when I first used it on my AC97 built-in sound chip. I had just set up a new PC and was waiting for my soundcard to be sent from the UK. I got unbelievably low latency, full duplex operation and it even let me use multiple outs (2x stereo analog and 1x stereo digital). Of course, the actual sound was abysmal - terrible noise and clarity, but the worst was the stereo separation.

Reverse Engineer · Post by **Reverse Engineer** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:33 pm

bduffy wrote:Well colour me wrong! I've never heard of onboard cards being taken seriously, I didn't know ASIO4ALL was that good. Usually onboard audio is just mentioned as something to disable; I can't imagine using it on my desktop with Cubase, but that's great that people can use them, especially on a laptop.

I would NEVER use the onboard on my desktop (although theoretically it's better than my laptops.) I think because laptops are (like macs) component matched, and with the addition of power management etc perform better in general.

My laptop with a 1.3ghz Pentium M, well outperforms my 1.7ghz P4. Both have 512mb ram (although my laptop has a 64mb video card and my desktop is 32mb.)

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:33 pm

jackson wrote:
bduffy wrote:Well colour me wrong! I've never heard of onboard cards being taken seriously, I didn't know ASIO4ALL was that good. Usually onboard audio is just mentioned as something to disable; I can't imagine using it on my desktop with Cubase, but that's great that people can use them, especially on a laptop.
It blew me away when I first used it on my AC97 built-in sound chip. I had just set up a new PC and was waiting for my soundcard to be sent from the UK. I got unbelievably low latency, full duplex operation and it even let me use multiple outs (2x stereo analog and 1x stereo digital). Of course, the actual sound was abysmal - terrible noise and clarity, but the worst was the stereo separation.

Right; like Ohm pointed out (and I forgot), there is the fundamental sound quality problem. So I guess that's primarily a temporary/recreational solution, not exactly what you want to mix an album on.

But stiil, surprising performance! I'm going to try these asio2ks drivers with my crappy Echo card (currently using ASIO4ALL), see what happens.

sposey1969 · Post by **sposey1969** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:37 pm

I use the onboard card all the time in my HP desktop (SoundMAX Integrated). Latency is typically better than 5ms at 48KHz. I get better latency results out of ASIO4ALL 1.8, but I run version 2 on my homebuilt PC because I use 4 soundcards for 8-channel simultaneous recording. Version 1.8 only supports one soundcard.

If there's something (free) better than ASIO4ALL, I haven't seen it.

EDIT... I had trouble getting ASIO4ALL v2 to recognize all of my cards, too. The trick was to use the Offline Settings tool, and descend the tree of information on each card and manually Enable the OUT and the IN connections. Once I did that, the host software didn't have any trouble seeing it. Hopefully that's your problem too.

Reverse Engineer · Post by **Reverse Engineer** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:38 pm

an OT question..but does anyone know, with the complete rebuilding of the windows audio system, will asio become unecessary in the future?

quincy · Post by **quincy** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:51 pm

Thanks for all the comments. Alas it seems it is a problem with renoise not with ASIO4ALL. I'll maybe give it a spin with some demos of other hosts and see what happens.

Cheers

jackson · Post by **jackson** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:56 pm

Reverse Engineer wrote:an OT question..but does anyone know, with the complete rebuilding of the windows audio system, will asio become unecessary in the future?

Speculation here, but... Microsoft have rarely done anything to assist media production software. The impression that I get is that ASIO and in particular ASIO4ALL are ways to circumvent the MS system to "get at" the hardware directly. Microsoft wants everyone to just do things their way and use their API's, etc.

SO, I highly doubt it. I mean, do you really see them pulling a Core Audio type deal?

Reverse Engineer · Post by **Reverse Engineer** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 7:08 pm

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/arc ... 71346.aspx Well, after reading here and a few other places, i get the impression they are at least "trying." Even kvr gets a mention.

Sickle · Post by **Sickle** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 7:08 pm

You can also try the freeasio driver that comes with Tobybear's MiniHost application.

Any alternatives to ASIO4ALL?