Changes since version 2.18

• Fix aggregation issue when mixing WaveCyclic output and WaveRT polled input devices, resulting in input signal distortion.
• Fix sporadic host reset loop in Studio One (and may be other hosts, too).
• Remove PnP ID from device tooltip window, thus cleaning up the GUI somewhat.
• Fix detection of Bluetooth device connect/disconnect status. This would have resulted in some connected devices disappearing and some disconnected ones visible.
• Fix minor resource leak across host reset requests.
• Some minor tweaks to WaveRT buffer handling.

Changes since version 2.17

• No longer crashes after USB audio device surprise removal. The expected behavior is to attempt a reconnect and resume audio streaming. Having your USB audio interface connected to a KVM switch, changing between computers – with ASIO4ALL currently active on both – should result in a graceful handover in either direction.
• Some more work went into accurate audio buffer synchronization. The “Buffer Offset” slider is about to become phased out. If your setup absolutely requires a non-default position, I’d be interested to learn about it! (Except when trying to “fix” sample clock drift issues this way…)
• Fix unexpected behavior (including crash) when host tried to set a new sample rate.
• Good old plain Azalia WaveRt devices will no longer have their position register ignored despite a returned accuracy of “0”.
• Further improve input/output latency reporting.
• The “Debug” option has been debugged and will better assist debugging whenever there is something to debug.
• In preparation of the upcoming device audio clock drift correction (yes!), ASIO4ALL can now measure and display the actual sample frequencies of individual devices, either directly or inside the tooltip window when hovering over. This shall help finding out wether individual device clocks are synchronized or not. Since the system clock serves as a reference clock, measurement results always are only relative, never absolute! Accuracy will improve with run time. Give it at least 5-10 minutes for a useful reading!

Changes since version 2.17 Beta 2:

• Squeeze another millisecond out of USB 1 audio device latency
• Completely remove the legacy “Use hardware buffer” – option, along with the selection of 3 or 4 KS buffers. This is >20 years old stuff and does not serve any meaningful purpose on modern systems.
• Fix an issue where some audio inputs would not show up
• Lower CPU utilization also in Wavert polling mode when “Low Power Mode” option is enabled
• Improve input/output latency reporting
• The installer now has a “Debug” option. When selected, a debug handler will be added, catching application errors instead of just silently crashing to desktop.
• Minor fixes for improved stability and performance
  
  

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 all else fails, open Task Manager and kill the “audiodg.exe” process! This is the Windows Audio engine. ASIO4ALL does not need that.

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.

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.

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 they represent the whole of driver/OS/hardware inherent latencies. If the guess was correct, that is…

Online Audio & DJ Communities

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!

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.

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.