Is it possible to have two Asio sound cards working in the same computer.?
Just bought Saphire 8i6 and very pleased with it. but could have done with another pair of inputs so I can add external FX. A friend has given me a working M-Audio 1010lt card which also works fine in Asio mode. I've got no experience with Asio4All . does that deal with this sort of issue. The obvious thing here is I should have gone for an interface with extra ins (more expensive). but didn't consider this issue.
Any ideas guys and girls ? would be most appreciated.

Roy

My understanding is only 1 ASIO card/driver can be running. You will want to use the native ASIO driver that comes with the card you are using.

Since ASIO4ALL is a wrapper around, I believe, the WMD drivers it will never be as efficient as the native ASIO driver. However, it might allow mulitple cards to provided each card has a WMD driver...not sure about that though.

Regards,

Since ASIO4ALL is a wrapper around, I believe, the WMD drivers it will never be as efficient as the native ASIO driver. However, it might allow mulitple cards to provided each card has a WMD driver...not sure about that though.

 
Close but not quite.  WDM drivers do not need wrapping because you can have more that one WDM driver exposed and running.
ASIO drivers on the other hand, and more specifically, ASIO spec only allows one ASIO driver to be exposed at a time. So, ASIO4ALL is a "one driver fits all" type of solution that wraps (though wrap is really not the right word) different ASIO drivers so that they all appear to be using the same driver.
 
Should work for the OP, but different results are reported based on the actual quality of the OEM ASIO drivers.
 
Brian

Thanks men so far sounds like it may be at least worth trying Asio4All at any rate.

Roy

Thing is, even if you get two working through asio4all, the two cards need to be hard-wired together for timing purposes. One has to be the master clock, the other will be the slave.

1010 LT driver is multi client asio driver... so you can run 2 cards off the same off the one driver if you put another one in , obv. the same card again..

I did try to spdif sync 2 cards (other a yamaha) and it was a nightmare and the clocks kept dropping.

I'd go with WDM over asio4all though.

ASIO4All does not use ASIO drivers. It uses WDM and MME drivers to appear to a host as if the card had ASIO drivers. There is no good reason to use ASIO4all if your card has ASIO drivers. The only host that will not use WDM drivers is Cubase. That was the reason why ASIO4all was developed in the first place. 

ASIO supports only one driver at a time Where WDM supports multiple drivers. The reason is WDM is also a general driver model for all windows devices. If it only would support one driver than you can see how that would work out. Only one device would work at a time. 

The two both work well if written well. Sonar supports all windows audio device drivers. So for the user its best to use one that gives you the best results and is the most stable. With some developers both drivers models are well written and the user has a real choice. Others favor one over the other and this leaves the user stuck with only one good driver. In general the ASIO driver is often favored by developers because Cubase uses it.  However, being ASIO is no recommendation that it is the best driver. For a Windows machine a well written WDM type driver for low latency can often out perform an ASIO driver. There is no special magic with ASIO.     

no it was dev'd because the owner wanted ASIO support for their ac97 soundcard. states so on the makers own page under history, nothing to do with cubase.. only a reference to steiny as it's their tech.      

http://tippach.business.t...o4all/intro.html 

cubase does support WDM , via directX within it's menu's (well in 6.5).. I just double checked as I can't recall it not supporting it, and thats going back from various versions over the years. I can't recall if it did it always directly OR via directx though 100% .. but I do recall seeing both MME / WDM in the past.  no replacement for a decent asio card and a false enconomy if you spent loads of DAW / synths etc already.

much like the KX project was started to get an asio driver for CJ's fav card (SB live)

More thanks to all these replies, I get them both working on Wdm but the 1010lt doesn't like 24bit in wdm mode at least I think its the 1010lt I wonder if this is where I should be syncing over the spdif so I'll give that a try today.

Roy