ASIO is the preferred driver for many of the better sound cards and interfaces. It will come with those devices on a disk or as a download from the manufacturer's website.

Do not confuse ASIO4ALL with ASIO because they are not the same thing. A4A is a wrapper that tries to fool the hardware into thinking MME is ASIO. It can be effective sometimes but I have found that it doesn't seem to work on any of my computers. If it doesn't work, remove it from the computer so you don't have conflicts when you do get the right hardware and Native ASIO.

If you have an off the shelf, factory setup, computer, normally with a cheap soundcard, there's a very good chance that changing to ASIO will not make it work better. In fact the opposite can often be the case. So the hardware really has to be designed to support the ASIO driver or you don't gain anything generally speaking, from using ASIO over MME.

Yes, it's true that ASIO is available to the programs that have it set as the default driver for the sound card but only the first one started will get it loaded. All you need to remember is to start the most important program that needs ASIO (in my case that is Sonar) and then start the others that will run OK on MME. If I'm composing and not planning to record, BB is first up and it gets ASIO.

ASIO is most useful when you are running synths and VST's in a program with audio tracks as well. The processing and internal stuff is better accomplished with ASIO vs MME. MME simply can't handle the synths in real time like ASIO. Most often, you get clicks, pops, drops, and severe latency that makes it difficult to work effectively.

I can run BB with MME and not have any issues but as soon as I load RB or Sonar, I need to have them running on ASIO because they simply don't work well with MME.

Hope this helps you a bit in understanding the ins and outs of ASIO vs MME.

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