Home Studio and WASAPI

ADD note  Dec 1st- When I wrote this only Home Studio had the WASAPI support. Now all versions have it. 
 
I bought Home Studio the other day as I wanted to see if it might be what I'm looking for as a simple, plain DAW, and it's  Sonar. I've messed around with a few other DAW's and most are way less complicated than our beloved Splat, but each will fall short somewhere along the line and I will stay put for now. One use I'll have for HS is live multitrack playback at gigs. I think it will be perfect as it include the Playlist -but no lyric view :(
I also installed it on a laptop I have taken to work ( log term care facility -Activities)  and this is where I noticed it used WASAPI drivers. Then I read that this is a new feature. An attempt to allow running Sonar sans our beloved Audio interface which is what I'll be doing with the laptop at work. 
Well my testing using the loopback recording to test the drivers reporting latency to Sonar shows WASAPI is certainly not going replace ASIO. ( edit) -At least not under Windows 7. 
 

WASAPI has 2  choices in Sonar first is Shared- the other is Exclusive. Exclusive gives you a few more in/ out choices  if your sound card has them,  as well as it performed a tiny bit better on the loopback test as you can see. Use it for better performance. This test is on a 2008 dual core Sony Laptop W7 64bit using on board audio.
Track 7 and 8   used a Behringer UCA 200 interface,
Track 9 my Tascam us1641. running driver 2.05.  
Screenshot results: 
Track 1- MIDI kick on quarter notes 
Track 2- SI drums frozen audio track 
Track 3- WASAPI shared - note it is about 1/8 note late , unexeptable
Track 4- WASAPI ecxclusive- about 1/16 note late, better but not good enough
Track 5- MME mode same as WASAPI shared @ 1/8 note late
Track 6- WDM mode- didn't work pink noise,, 
Track 7- Behringer USB codex - WDM ( it's default)  mode best so far but still 1/32 late 
Track 8- Behringer USB codex WASAPI- worst so far 
Track 9 Tascam ASIO mode - perfect timing , say no more. 
 
Not under WASAPI with my Tascam you only get 8 inputs and no SPDIF. 
I'm curious to try asio4all? should I dare? 
 
Note, tried this test on another machine, HP Pavilion i7 3.2 quad. 
Could not get it to work, WASAPI would not recognise any of the 3 inputs correctly so could not record input. 

Good point and I do intend to run the loopback on as many computers as possible. My main DAW is W 10 but it does not have on board audio so I can't use that. But my office computer is also Windows 10 with on board , but this requires installing CCC and Home studio so takes time and bandwidth. 
 
So if anybody else reading this has bought HS and is running Windows 10 could you please try the test. 
Here's how:
Disconnect your audio interface and test your on board audio is active and working. 
Open a blank project, no effects etc. 
Go to Preferences / Audio / Playback and recording and set to WASAPI shared. Mine defaulted to this automatically.  
Insert a midi drum track kick or snare at 1/4 notes for a few measures. 
Insert TTS-1 or SI drums and freeze the midi track to create an audio track. 
Insert a few audio tracks. Set output to NONE, do not use input echo. 
Take a 1/8" TRS to 1/8" TRS cable and jump the on board audio output back to the input. 
Select the audio track input, set in record ready, play and adjust volume, I had to use my speaker volume control and even that was pretty hot. Don't worry, louder the better the image. 
Now record the loopback. 
Repeat this test using more tracks and try all the different driver settings, reconnect your audio interface and select ASIO and try that. This might require re start of Sonar. 
Try as many interfaces as you dare. 
 
I would also love it is someone with a Mac tried this with Core Audio and on board :) 
 

I have to admit I thought this was a legacy product when I saw the screenshot. I have Music Creator 7 and wasn't aware of any other similar CW product at that price-point.
 
Turns out Home Studio was just released! Though you wouldn't know it from the CW website or shop: As of two minutes ago, it's not showing up in the CW product line-up. I had to Google it and find the direct link.
 
I'm interested to see how it compares to MC7.  They seem awfully similar.  Is HS replacing MC7?  Who can tell? 

They certainly seem slow at updating the website, maybe they are too busy baking the bakery :) 
 
I could not find much about it and without the link provided in the other thread you won't be able to even purchase it. 
 
http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR-Home-Studio
 
I'll report about my experience working with it so far when I get a chance. 
 

scook
It is has been on the Cakewalk website main page for about a week.
 

You are correct.  And if someone is browsing at the home page, then he would surely see it.
 
I typically go straight to CW's Product page or the Shop when looking for items.  Currently, Home Studio is not showing up in either place.

Yes I use the menu at the top of this forum and it was hard to find through that set of links. 
No matter,  they should still fix that because it would make more people aware of its existence. 
I even used Google and all the pages where about the older version, so that's bad too. 
 
And that little comparison chart would be super handy but without the link you posted you'll never find it. I was not even sure that TTS-1 was included until i saw that chart. Then I installed it to a fresh machine with no other prior versions and now I know exactly what is included plug in wise. 

I just tried a loopback test, playing the metronome out from the computer earphone jack to the laptop's internal mic input. Referring to the screen shot, the metronome hit at 7.500 seconds and the audio was recorded at 7.508, so that's 8 ms RTL. Not 3 ms, but certainly better than previous Windows audio (and better than what I typically get from USB 2.0 ASIO interfaces).
 

 
 
I wonder if the 3 ms figure quoted by Windows is incoming only instead of RTL? In any event, not sure why I'm getting 8 and you're getting 15; I know you're very knowledgeable about this kind of thing. 
 
I've pinged Noel for comment, but he's away ATM so not sure when there will be a response.

Anderton
Yes, it's replacing Music Creator. 

I thought as much. MC7 is on sale for $20. SHS for $35. They both have the same regular price of $50 which could be a clue to MC's demise. I paid $100 for HS9 in 1999. $29 for MC3 in 2006. $129 for SHS7 XL upgrade. So $50 for SHS sounds great.

The reason I do the test the way I do it is important because that is what will be happening to anybody recording new tracks alongside already recorded audio tracks. 
And using the metronome does not give you a visual comparison of the wave form. Good trick, but I prefer the visual. 
 
This test is for testing the accuracy of the audio driver reporting to Sonar. This is NOT a RTL test. Please don't get the two confused. 
I have a reported RTL of 26ms,, but the Tascam ASIO driver and Sonar sort that out and my tracks, under ASIO, are bang on the money.
 
I've tested many ASIO (and WDM ) drivers on a few different interfaces, and others here have reported in on the thread I started in Hardware forum, conclusion-  all the good well known brands are always right on the money... It is only when you try and use something other than a good ASIO driver that things run amok. 
This is defiantly true of on board audio cards and any USB device that does not include ASIO drivers. They always have been way out of sync. 
 
Sonar , it is said will compensate using the reported latency from the driver, if it is wrong, your new audio tracks will be recorded either late, or even early. This is unexceptionable. 
 
So I found WASPI so far is no better under W7,  if it does work under W10 this is good news for many people who are not that interested in spending $200 on an interface. I'm just skeptical about the offset still. Until I see a screenshot like mine. 
 
Thanks for the shots so far, good stuff keep them coming.

Some notes:
 
1. The core goal for us developing WASAPI support was for better supporting the plethora of consumer audio devices. USB/Bluetooth speakers, mic's, headsets as well as USB guitar cables. We now have great built in support for many consumer audio devices and onboard audio chipsets. 
 
2. You will get the best performance with WASAPI in Windows 10. It has several internal optimizations that Win 8 or earlier won't be able to match.
 
3. The advantage of WASAPI over ASIO is that you can couple together devices from different manufacturers. e.g use a rocksmith guitar cable and output to your onboard audio or a USB speaker and play at low latency. 
In WASAPI shared mode you can also jam along with your favorite youtube video.
 
4. The Windows 10 "inbox" HDAudio driver has been optimized for the new low latency API's. With it you will be able to dial back the buffer size to about 3 msec on supported onboard audio devices even in WASAPI shared mode. On Win 8 and below the min shared mode latency is 10 msec.
 
5. Its hard to measure WASAPI performace with pro audio devices currently. I've seen great variances with pro audio devices since driver vendors are only optimizing for ASIO mode and not testing with WASAPI since there aren't many pro audio apps that support it well. As a result you may get sub par performance with some pro audio devices. I will be contacting some vendors with problem reports. This isn't a problem with WASAPI per se but the vendors implementation itself.
 
6. WASAPI will typically work with any device that shows up and works in WINDOWS itself (right click on speaker icon / playback devices in windows). I've tried it on several pro audio interfaces as well such as an RME UFX and a MOTU. With pro audio devices you may also need to set the device latency independently in the driver control panel to get low latency
 
7. The new WASAPI support allows us to dial back the buffer size on supported drivers/hardware down to 3 msec. This doesn't mean that round trip latency will be 3 msec, since that depends on the hardware implementation. However on a Surface Pro 4 I got imperceptable latency playing guitar through onboard audio while patched in with a rocksmith cable and running in exclusive mode at 3 msec.

Yes I've tested both bluetooth headsets as well as bluetooth speakers and they work fine. You can even record from a bluetooth headset and use the transport controls on these headsets to control SONAR.
The latency for bluetooth is high so its not useful for input monitoring - you can playback and mix with them however. With WASAPI exclusive you can run at a low buffer size so you can reduce the latency to just the bluetooth latency.

There is no mechanism for WASAPI or WDM for that matter to report input or output hardware latency.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
There is no mechanism for WASAPI or WDM for that matter to report input or output hardware latency.

Hmmm... so WDM and WASAPI modes do no automatic record latency compensation, and you have to do it all with Manual Offset? I guess that makes sense given that the average offset I saw in testing was approximately half the RTL. But that doesn't explain the variability in the recorded click position given that the latency was not varying from one take to the next.
 
I played around with this some more, and after a while every take I recorded was being properly compensated by a Manual Offset of 249 samples, but initially that definitely wasn't the case.
 
That said, although I prefer ASIO's sample-accurate consistency, I would not really be too concerned about a ±1ms variability in record latency being audible in most real-world situations.

Cactus Music
I didn't do the second test which is to loop back 3 minutes of audio and check the drift over time.. that's yet another issue that develops when using so, so audio drivers.

That shouldn't be possible so long as Playback and Record Timing Masters are referencing channels on the same device.

Tested... Mixing, Full load of plugins and tracks... Flawless! and sounds no different then my Lexicon Alpha (ASIO)  
I love the WASAPI exclusive!!!
 
Now that's what I'm talking about!
THANK YOU!