ASIO4ALL is used to wrap wdm divers when the daw app only supports asio and the sound card does not have asio drivers.  Using it in sonar, which supports several types of drivers (including asio and wdm) is unnecessary. All you are doing is adding latency to a wdm driver by wrapping it with another layer of software.

I agree with the above comments about Asio4all....

M-Audio does support ASIO so go with that.....

But, from my awful experience with the Delta 1010 and Sonar I wish you the best of luck.

@Timeking

A high latency for ASIO is likely to be the combination of Sample Rate and ASIO Buffer Size.

IF you don't mind - go into the ASIO control panel for your M-Audio driver (might be through Sonar  or might be down in your system tray - it varies from interface vendor to vendor).

Anyways, in there - try a Sample Rate of 44.1, and an ASIO Buffer Size of 128 (I used to have an option to set mine to 64, but new drivers from Presonus removed that choice).  

Then go into Sonar Preferences, set the driver mode to ASIO, using your M-Audio device, apply, then make sure the Sample Rate is also 44.1 in Sonar.  You will see the total round trip latency in Preferences, as well, and that should be a bit lower.

But before any of the above, really, delete ASIO4ALL.

Bob Bone

That is kind weird. I just changed to WDM from ASIO and things seem smoother, and even the project loads quicker. AND lower latency.

I use ASIO with a delta1010 and they work. WDM also works and I agree with James that sometimes it seems like smoother operations.

Before I installed ASIO4All, I kept having dropouts with the Maudio ASIO driver.  Afterward, not.  Anywho, per the above recommendations, I deleted A4A, and went back and tried the Maudio ASIO driver.  Now, like magic, it works, with a latency of 5.3ms.  That 5.3 must be a hardware limit, since I got 5.3 with the WDM driver. 

This kind of stuff is EXACTLY why I periodically clone my harddrive with Acronis.  When (not if) my drive takes a dump, I can bypass all this tweaking silliness and get back to making music!!!

SOOOOOO kewl when someone gets an issue like this resolved.

Wahoo!

Bob Bone

I think that is why I used the WDM driver with M-Audio. No difference in performance between ASIO and WDM. The WDM mode has the added convenience of adjusting the latency inside SONAR with the slider. I recall having to change latency often between tracking and mixing.

Use what works best. I've used interfaces where WDM works best and others such as my current ZED-R16 where ASIO is the way to go. WDM with that is so bad it only exposes 8 of the 18 in/outs.

ASIO4ALL works great on some things such as internal sound cards but that just wraps up the WDM driver. If a device has native drivers they should be the way to go.

Its very normal that one driver mode will work better than another driver mode. Thats just how it is

Cj