WDM ASIO Link Driver

[mr_es335]

Hello,

Does this look at all - interesting?: WDM ASIO Link Driver

[RBIngraham]

Yes it does.

I would double check to make sure it doesn't add any additional latency, but it could be really useful.

Also I would want to make sure it can deal with high channel counts. The screen shots don't make it look like he is using all that many I/O channels. So who knows if he could allow for up to 72 I/O.

[DominicPerry]

It doesn't like DAWs which start and stop the ASIO driver. I think we can put SAW and SAC in that category. It might still work, of course, there's no explanation as to why it's a problem or what the consequences are.

Dominic

[operationwhat]

I've been using this driver for a week or so, and it's stable and flexible. Great stuff!
I mainly use it for mp3 or cd playback into SAC, but used it to fool my friends on skype
Used a pitchshifter on my voice and routed it to Skype input...

[erlohr]

Could this be used to route audio from the host to the remote over the network connection? Like for hearing the solo at the remote.

[RBIngraham]

Maybe. But the thing to keep in mind is that all your audio would have to route this this driver. That is one more extra layer of driver, one more location for some latency (maybe?) and most importantly one more thing to go wrong.

Adding in extra stuff that could potentially take down the system would make me nervous. At the very least I would make sure I spent a good long time testing the hell out of this thing before I put it out in the field.

I'll probably give the demo a shot on my home system and see what happens. But I have to wait till I have time to tinker.

[RobertV]

Maybe. But the thing to keep in mind is that all your audio would have to route this this driver. That is one more extra layer of driver, one more location for some latency (maybe?) and most importantly one more thing to go wrong.

Adding in extra stuff that could potentially take down the system would make me nervous. At the very least I would make sure I spent a good long time testing the hell out of this thing before I put it out in the field.

I'll probably give the demo a shot on my home system and see what happens. But I have to wait till I have time to tinker.

Richard; are you saying that it is not possible to run more than one Asio driver / device on each machine (which with the WDM Asio Link driver means 8 track max.)?
That would put a damper on things, I was planning to experiment with this driver, as I am running mLan as the main interface and I expected to be able to run the WDM Asio Link driver in addition.

Cheers;
RobertV
www.shinustudios.com

[RBIngraham]

Well ASIO itself was never really created to be multi-client. And I know of no software that I can think of off the top of my head that allows you to communicate with multiple audio interfaces via ASIO at the same time.

There are a few sound card drivers that have written multi-client ASIO drivers. (meaning more than one piece of software can access a particular piece of hardware at one time) But it is not common.

SAC will only talk to one ASIO driver at a time. Actually it will only talk to one driver at a time period... ASIO, WDM, etc.. I think if you put it in MME mode it will connect to multiple drivers but that is not very useful for SAC as almost all MME drivers are very high latency and not very efficient. Very few pieces of pro audio software work very well using MME.

So what I'm saying is, if you wanted to use that ASIO to Network connection, you would have to have SAC communicate to this ASIO Link driver. Then the driver would link to the ASIO connection on your sound card and you could link in another piece of software (or the Windows OS) via WDM at the same time. So yeah, all the audio in and out of SAC would have to go thru this driver I would suspect. Unless my reading of the web site is wrong and there is more to it than meets the eye.

Also in order to receive the Solo bus audio on say a SAC Remote PC sitting on the network, you would have to run that driver on the SAC remote as well and have it link to either the built in sound card (probably via WDM) or have another ASIO sound card on that SAC Remote computer.

I can see places where that kind of stuff could be handy. And having the Solo bus audio show up over the network is something SAC users have been asking for for years now. But to me this driver might seem a bit risky. Just as most of the other attempts to make this happen have been. Like Wormhole for example. (had a tendency to make SAC unstable if memory serves)

I don't know if this driver has a channel count limit. Does it? If it does, I think it pretty much shoots it down as being very useful to SAC users. But I don't know yet.

[Yogi]

It only has a count limit in the demo mode. count limit with the paid version depends on processor speed ... etc.

[RBIngraham]

Yogi, long time no see...

Good to know. Have you tried it out with SAC? Is it stable?