Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) is a computer soundcard driver protocol for digital audio specified by Steinberg, providing a low-latency and high fidelity interface between a software application and a computer's sound card. Whereas Microsoft’s DirectSound is commonly used as a stereo input and output for non-professional users, ASIO allows musicians and sound engineers to process their audio via Windows computer software instead of external hardware. ASIO bypasses the normal audio path from the user application through layers of intermediary Windows operating system software, so that the application connects directly to the soundcard hardware. Each layer that is bypassed means a reduction in latency, the delay between an application sending sound to the sound being reproduced by the soundcard. In this way ASIO offers a relatively simple way of accessing multiple audio inputs and outputs independently. Its main strength lies in its method of bypassing the inherently high latency of Windows audio mixing kernels (KMixer), allowing direct, high speed communication with audio hardware. Unlike KMixer, an unmixed ASIO output is "bit identical", that is, the bits sent to the sound card are identical to those of the original WAV file, thus having higher audio fidelity. Interface support is normally restricted to Microsoft Windows, since other operating systems (e.g. Apple's Mac OS X or Linux) do not have such mixer latency problems (see Core Audio and ALSA). In Windows Vista, KMixer has been removed and replaced by a new WaveRT port driver. WaveRT cannot provide synchronized audio to multiple devices and does not support external clocks. As of 2007 there is also an experimental ASIO driver for Wine, a Windows layer for Linux. This wineasio driver uses the JACK sound server as its audio back-end and allows many ASIO-aware applications to run with low-latency under WINE.
Combined 32/64 bit version, supports Win 98SE/ME/2k/XP/MCE/2003/XP64 and Vista/Windows 7 x86/x64
v2.10 English, click here
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