Originally Posted by Gordon Scott
Originally Posted by Simon - PG Music
I find that ASIO4All causes more problems than it solves, however it is very widely used
There's an alternative used by many that avoids some problems, but appears to introduce some different ones of its own: FlexASIO.

I've never used either, so can't offer a detailed perspective or a BIAB judgement.
FlexASIO is very good, however it works differently.

ASIO4All requires "exclusive mode", I believe using WDM Kernel Streaming, which is the lowest latency mode. It's problematic as it disallows any other apps to use the sound card, plus many audio drivers just don't play nicely with it.

FlexASIO defaults to using a "shared mode", which has somewhat higher latency than exclusive modes, however much less problematic. Unlike ASIO4All though, FlexASIO can also be set up using a variety of other shared and exclusive modes. The downside is that this has to be manually entered into a config file, as there is no user interface (though a third party GUI app exists). Thankfully the defaults tend to work quite well.

Originally Posted by Matt Finley
Gordon, I’ve never heard of that. Still, everyone on Windows serious about making music should consider a separate sound card with its own driver.
This is correct though - there is no replacement for an actual real ASIO driver. "Fake" ASIO drivers like the above are essentially wrappers that pipe the audio through the Windows audio system (which has significant latency), while real ASIO has low latency specifically because it bypasses the Windows audio systems.

Something to keep in mind though is that there are plenty of companies out there selling inexpensive audio interfaces and advertising ASIO - except that their "official" ASIO driver is ASIO4All rather than a true ASIO driver! For this reason it's best to stick to the "bigger" companies like Focusrite, Steinberg, RME, MOTU, etc - although that isn't a hard rule. It's always best to do your research before buying anything.

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