Ron - ASIO4ALL is not an actual driver itself. In order to make ASIO4ALL clear, I'll need to try to explain on a little more basic level about soundcard drivers in general.

There are several driver protocols. the most popular ones are MME, WDM and ASIO. MME and WDM are both Microsoft protocols. ASIO was developed by Steinberg but is now a consortium with other developers.

each soundcard manufacturer must write different drivers for each of the protocols that it will be compliant with. for example, if my M-audio Delta 44 wants to be compliant with MME, WDM and ASIO, then it will write THREE different drivers, one for each protocol.

Then the you choose in the host (BB in this case) which protocol driver to use by selecting that particular "driver mode." (in BB that's either MME or ASIO). that's just a pointer or a "switch" that tells the host which driver of the 3 (in the example above) to choose from. the other 2 drivers are not used by that host.

so if a soundcard manufacturer decides that it is only going to write TWO drivers for everyone to use. And they decide that they will write their driver to be compliant with MME and WDM driver modes because that's what 99% of windows users will use anyway (audio guys like us are a small minority in the overall computer market).

enter ASIO4ALL. ASIO4ALL is a WDM wrapper. what it does, is it allows the host to access ASIO protocols (and thereby bypassing the kernel) but it uses the soundcards' WDM drivers to do access the soundcard. basically it's an "interpreter" allowing WDM drivers to be used in ASIO mode in the host. That will allow the soundcard to have lower latency and other benefits from using ASIO driver mode, but it still accesses the WDM drivers written by the soundcard manufacturer.

as far as it "emulating the later specs" - yes, the latest versions of ASIO4ALL are ASIO 2 compliant. I haven't used it in a long, long time, so I don't remember if they've updated it for ASIO3 compliance or not. however, at this time there are very few hosts which are ASIO3 compliant. Sonar is NOT ASIO3 compliant and the only one that I KNOW that's ASIO3 compliant is Cubase 5 (and the latest Nuendo and the latest other Stienberg softwares).

Hope that's clear enough!

Last edited by Beagle; 02/26/10 07:55 AM.
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