John
ASIO4All should be avoided if you can. It is not ASIO. What it is is a wrapper for WDM. All it does is make hosts think you have an ASIO driver when you really don't. This was important for running Cubase back in the day when it did not come with a generic ASIO driver. If you had a card that didn't have an ASIO driver and many did not support ASIO, Cubase did not support WDM. It only supported MME. You lost all your multiple inputs and outs. MME supports. only one stereo pair.   
 
Another reason I like Sonar it will use any any driver. 

I know what ASIO4All does. It has always worked fine for me.
 
Sonar has a bug preventing it from working with the WDM drivers supplied with the Tascam US-16x08. Every other DAW and audio program I have work fine with the Tascam WDMs and this includes ASIO4All, so the only way of getting Sonar to work is over ASIO4All.
 
The bug is confirmed by other members of this forum and I have reported it.
 
ASIO4All has been a great help to me for many years and in many situations.

+1 for asio4all here, too, no trubs over many years use

tenfoot

Zargg71
Hi. There are a few companies that produces Audio Interfaces that allows working with more with that one ASIO interfaces at the time. RME is one of them.
All the best.

 
We can just add that to our very long list list of good reasons to own an RME interface Ken:)

Agree

By definition, there can be only one active ASIO device.
Multiple units can be installed... but only one active.
 
The way some companies get around this issue:
Allow additional audio interface/s to show up as simply more I/O ports using the same ASIO driver.
 
Note that even if you could run multiple ASIO devices simultaneously, you'd need to have all devices sharing a single digital-clock.  Otherwise, tracks recorded/played across the units would drift apart over time.
 
Having multiple (similar/identical) audio interfaces show up as more I/O under a single ASIO driver is an elegant solution to what might otherwise be a PITA (clocking/etc).
 
RME audio interfaces have always been great performers.
Even back prior to the original PCI Hammerfall cards...

This is tangential to the ASIO issue, but I use an E-Mu 1616m, with E-Mu's Patchmix software. It's actually an old Cardbus card with a breakout box. I bought it 10 years ago to use with a laptop rig, liked the feature set, and the sound quality has alwas seemed fine, so I bought a $10 PCI to Cardbus adapter to use it on my desktop, which is also long in the tooth. Despite this arcane hardware setup, and being long discontinued and unsupported, it works perfectly under W10 64-bit. I can run Sonar on the ASIO driver, and standard Windows audio drivers simultaneously, to run Sound Forge or whatever, and pipe audio between them in complex configurations, in real time, with no issues whatsoever. I can even use (fairly awful) real-time DSP effects that run on the card, though I generally don't, because they're fairly awful. I can't believe it still works after all these years, but it ain't broke, so I don't fix it!

Does patchmix still work on W10? I have an 1820M, not sure if that's the same software version. But yeah being able to run and mix (and reroute!) both Windows and ASIO audio is a great feature of that card. My RME UCX/Totalmix is even more flexible but I really like that E-MU Patchmix lets you reroute Windows audio into an ASIO input so easily. I use it to sample off YouTube, or any other app generating audio really.

Sanderxpander
Does patchmix still work on W10? I have an 1820M, not sure if that's the same software version. But yeah being able to run and mix (and reroute!) both Windows and ASIO audio is a great feature of that card. My RME UCX/Totalmix is even more flexible but I really like that E-MU Patchmix lets you reroute Windows audio into an ASIO input so easily. I use it to sample off YouTube, or any other app generating audio really.

 
Well it works a charm here, I can't vouch for anyone else's setup. I think I'm using the last drivers they released, in like 2010, I remember something about a beta, it may be that. All I know is they're almost certainly never going to be updated, but they still work somehow, it's crazy. If/when it finally grinds to a halt, I'll be sad, but satisfied... I've also used it to record audio from youtube and other sources, though I try to keep it to legal applications... 
 

ASIO's initial popularity was mainly because it allowed you to bypass Windows' built-in mixer. When Microsoft designed its intrinsic audio support, it wasn't thinking about music production, but rather the other 99.99% of applications dubbed "multimedia". Which was perfectly reasonable. Nobody cares about a few milliseconds of added latency when playing video games, showing corporate slide shows or watching porn.
 
ASIO came along to fill a need for an audio subsystem that incurred as little overhead as possible. As home recording and Windows-based audio production took off in popularity, the number of users grew to a point where Microsoft could justify revamping their audio support to accommodate power users. WASAPI was their answer to ASIO. It's nearly as efficient as ASIO but far more sophisticated. It can be either exclusive like ASIO or shared like DirectX. 
 
So why is ASIO still around? Because WASAPI is Windows-exclusive. It's much easier for vendors to write ASIO drivers for both PC and Mac platforms in one go. When I had a MOTU interface, it was obvious that the company's background is Mac- and ASIO-oriented. That's when I started using ASIO, because MOTU's ASIO driver was better than their WDM/KS driver. ASIO works great with my current Focusrite product, so I'm sticking with it (ain't broke). It's likely that some interfaces still do better with ASIO because those companies have a longer history with it.
 
ASIO4All, btw, is not really an ASIO driver. It's WDM under the hood. Its purpose is to provide a faux-ASIO driver for interfaces that don't provide one of their own. Should be a last-resort option when nothing else works. (Correction: second-to-last option; MME always works.)

There have been a few cases where ASIO4All gets better latency than the driver the manufacturers provide. Mainly with cheaper end devices, e.g. the Focusrite 2i2 (or so I've read). Even though this is a WDM wrapper, not all DAWs support WDM. 
 
This is not an endorsement for ASIO4All btw, it wreaked havoc on my system even when I wasn't using it. I would definitely recommend using it as a last resort.

When I attempted to use WASAPI drivers with my most recent computer it only identified half of my interface inputs. I'm using a Presonus Firetube Studio. Asio identified all inputs and works decent. I concluded that for older hardware Asio was the way to go. I don't see it going away anytime soon. 
Nothing spectacular in terms of latency because my latency is set automatically in my interface control panel and locked so I can't play with it, probably based on a determination made by the software based on number of drivers and return time. If I played with mostly midi every day I would have already replaced it for this reason.