ORIGINAL: Blades

I've seen some interesting observations, this one being particularly so:

I use wdm drivers, and since I have a MOTU 896, I also use ASIO4ALL. I get the benefits of Sonar and a PC using wdm drivers, and the motu sees the asio drivers.

hmmm...it's one or the other

It's both. ASIO4ALL is a program for people who's audio program seems to work best with WDM/KS, but their hardware seems to work best with ASIO. With Sonar, I select WDM/KS, but my MOTU sees ASIO as translated by the free program ASIO4ALL.
From my understanding, most audio card companies include ASIO drivers written by the company, but for WDM, they basically defer to the Windows WDM/KS driver in xp. This may not be true in all or even many cases, but some companies seem to design their cards with the ASIO driver in mind.

Fortunately, Sonar can support WDM/KS or ASIO, but ASIO is, to my understanding, a "shell" written to talk to the programming that deals with the kernel level of a computer. WDM deals more directly at the kernel level, and is subsequently at a closer level than ASIO. This was not true with, for example Windows 98 and MME, which is why a program like ASIO was important for a company writing an audio program for a pc. When MS developed the WDM/KS part of the OS through xp, it was to make it more competetive with Apple's OS, which dealt with audio more efficiently back then. But by then, ASIO had already become firmly established with many in the pc community, despite it's limitations at that time.

From what I can tell, at this point, ASIO is probably unnecessary. But it allows Steinberg to stay a step ahead of everyone else, because ASIO is THEIR program, and, I think, they license it to others to use. (I'm assuming about the licensing ... I don't know that for certain.) But even ASIO has contiuned to improve, so it's now probably a toss up, as to which works most efficiently and at a lower latency.

Keep in mind, I'm a bass player, not an audio programmer. But this is my understanding of ASIO/WDM at this point. If I've said anything truly off the wall, I'm sure I'll be corrected ... I am hopeful gently. ;)

RME Fireface with ASIO. When I Upgraded to Sonar 6, it used WDM by default and my audio sounded terrible. Sounded like a circular saw was on one of the tracks. I switched to ASIO and almost all is good. I did notice that in WDM mode, the I/O's were numbered correctly. Not so with ASIO.

ORIGINAL: Billy Buck
Shouldn't we now be using ASIO, if we want to take advantge of the new Record Latency Adjustment (Advanced Audio Options), in SONAR 6? It seems to only work with and report latencies for ASIO. It seems ASIO is the way to go in SONAR 6 if you want to take advantage of record latency, in SONAR automatically.

I don't yet have Sonar 6, but from what I recall from this forum is that you can manually adjust that parameter for both ASIO and WDM, but only ASIO reports a number to set it automatically. I should probably dig up that post...

So it comes as a surprise to me that ASIO is supported by this ahead of WDM, even moreso that WDM isn't supported! Is this really the case?

The way I understood it, it was enabled for ASIO specifically because of the timing issues that I was describing above and that WDM didn't need to be adjusted because the issue didn't exist in the same way.

But I was apprently wrong about what exactly ASIO4ALL is - where I thought it was just an ASIO driver for cards that didn't have one or who's driver was lousy.

MOTU 828mkII, WDM, 1.3 ms. The ASIO drivers perform the same as WDM in my setup.

ORIGINAL: JustMike

RME Fireface with ASIO. When I Upgraded to Sonar 6, it used WDM by default and my audio sounded terrible. Sounded like a circular saw was on one of the tracks. I switched to ASIO and almost all is good. I did notice that in WDM mode, the I/O's were numbered correctly. Not so with ASIO.

You got the latest drivers and you do mean KS- WDM not normal WDM yeah?

KS WDM works fine here, although I keep it ASIO as there is a bug with input naming on sonar5 - you end up with hundreds of multiple entries every time you re-run the profiler.

The nice this with ASIO on the fireface is you can change latencies on the fly - no hassle - however you can't get higher than about 20ms @44.1khz so for really long latencies you need to use WDM KS.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

ORIGINAL: Bugermass

I don't understand why people have the need to adjust the latency slider?? I use Asio and I have no latency issues.. I run 30-40 tracks somtimes with tons of effects running with no issues of lag.. with both the Delta 66s (running 2 at once) or the single Motu 24I/O. . Even with the Motu I have done 24 tracks in a live environment with plugins in place for 3 hours straight before with no issues.. I don't see why you'd need to move the slider..

I never understand these kinds of posts. Just because you don't feel the need doesn't mean nobody else does.

And as for WDM: it never worked on my system. I always use ASIO. The only thing I noticed is that the calculation of the input latency doesn't work properly when I use the S/PDIF input of my Terratec card. I wondered why I all of a sudden started to play ahead of the beat through my Bass Pod Pro ;)

I have been getting blue screens with Delta 1010LT, and I get pops and clicks sometimes too.. only needing to increase latency to get rid of those pops and clicks...

so.. I wonder.. if I switch to ASIO, is that a totally different driver? The blue screens I get while using Sonar Producer 8.0.2 and Delta 1010 LT maybe just WDM driver? Maybe If I switch to ASIO would solve that problem?

By using ASIO or WDM, I see no difference other than instead of having 12 in and 10 out, I get only 6 in and 5 out with ASIO??? The sound quality is the same for both, both use the same ammount of cpu consumation.

I wonder what Sonar Recommands to use.. WDM or ASIO?

M-Audio article on setting it up on ASIO: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.faq&ID=a2d09b4b42075b2b9df638671975a8b4

ORIGINAL: Shadeline
I have been getting blue screens with Delta 1010LT, and I get pops and clicks sometimes too.. only needing to increase latency to get rid of those pops and clicks...

BSOD's are not a good thing and can indicate a driver issue or even a system issue (bad RAM or overheated CPU?).
What Delta driver are you using? I've been using the 5.10.0.5069 with a lot of success for a long while now. I can't
even remember the last time I had a BSOD and I use my DAW & Delta 66 card virtually every day. The only time I get ops & clicks is when I am at 64 samples and really stressing the CPU (80%-100%). Make sure your audio card is not sharing an IRQ. The Delta's are notorious for causing pops/clicks when sharing an IRQ with a video card or USB Host controller. Getting rid of unneeded IRQ overhead (like disabling unneeded USB ports, disabling onboard audio, Lan, floppy drive, etc from your BIOS) will go a long way to increasing system performance. Simply changing the PCI slot can work wonders.
As far as WDM or ASIO it depends a lot on your audio drivers. Both WDM & ASIO work well for me, but I get slightly better performance with WDM (plus I like using SONAR's buffer slider for quick latency changes on the fly) so I use WDM.

Good luck

Interesting thread. I found Jim Y's reply particularly interesting.

I have a Delta 66 and find the WDM/KS drivers to work better with Sonar and Project 5. What's interesting though is when I use VST's in standalone (or no host) mode they work best with the ASIO drivers for some reason. Maybe this is because of the way the M-Audio cards have built their driver architecture as Jim Y stated.

as i just moved from s7pe to s8pe i have also moved to ASIO drivers (by force) due to wdm drivers not allowing 24 bit recording in s8pe (very strange) - i ran WDM all the way up to this point with imperfect contentment.
note: (mabe a win dnld i need but aint going down that road) im on xpsp2 last full update was NOV 2008 and i dont/wont connect to the web on this machine due to not having any antivi on it and it works killer.

the latency slider is locked out with ASIO drivers so if you have a weak machine and need to creep up all the time it may be WDM for you
ASIO is stable.

the soundcard im running :RME Fireface 800 firewire (and recommend this product)

the 2 drivers give you a choice if your soundcard is having arough time of it mostly