I think you are WAY too deep into the "which driver should I use" debate. The rule I always went with was "If the sound card hardware supports ASIO, use it. If not, don't." ASIO has lower latency possible than MME. That's pretty much the difference. That has become such a conversational buzzword that it gets tossed around by people who really don't know what it means. Just like when people talk about "drivers" as a fix for everything. A software driver is the bridge between your operating system and any piece of hardware. Using your video card as an example, I have actually seen people on these forums tell users that if their PG software isn't working that they need to update their video card driver. Well, did the driver work okay YESTERDAY? Were there any video issues YESTERDAY? The video card gremlins don't magically come through the ether overnight and mess with your software drivers. So I said that to say this. You are going to have people who use ASIO tell you that nothing on the PLANET is better than ASIO. You will then have others tell you that MME works just fine. The difference is latency, and the hardware either does or does not support ASIO. Think about this in the same way you'd think of a guy who has never had a Ford in his life telling you how Chevy is so much better than Ford. Because it works FOR HIM.

Find your space, find your sound, do what is best for you. Try ASIO, then change to MME and reload the song and ask yourself if you notice any difference at all when you play along. There are users here who barely play instruments that are making songs that are close to 100% BIAB/RB, and for them, while not introducing live instruments, latency is a non-issue. So depending on how much you actually play in manually, a latency issue may or may not affect you. Not to insult you but I don't know your level of expertise in this arena. Latency is the time in milliseconds that elapses between the time you play a note, correctly stated "enter a note on event", and the time you actually hear that note. That lower the latency, obviously, the better. You can't have a 1/2 second delay from key press to sound, right? Processing power of your computer eventually works its way into the equation, but as always, the faster you can afford, the better. Also the more RAM you can afford the better, because it cuts down on the operating system having to swap files from RAM to hard drive, which is what your swap file is. I just paid what to me was a fortune for a new computer for the studio. I did not need a 8th computer in my house (3 are not even plugged into power), but I did it anyway. I'm a nerd and actually look for reasons to buy more stuff!

Last edited by eddie1261; 12/07/16 03:01 PM.