I need some audio help

Scaler 2 General Discussion
1

…and while this is only tangentially related to Scaler, I trust and appreciate the good folks here for advice. Admins, if too OT, please delete post with my apologies…

I am running Studio 1 on a Win10 machine, 32gb, Ryzen 5 5600x. I am running on Windows audio drivers. Scaler works just fine on it, as do a number of VST’s that I got from PB and one or two other places.

I recently bit on a very inexpensive bundle deal on two VST’s that seem VERY displeased with my default Windows audio buffer size. A few folks in the S1 FB group seemed surprised I wasn’t using ASIO4ALL drivers instead.

Should I be using ASIO4ALL, do I risk peril and driver-misery by loading them and/or breaking anything else in my system? I do NOT play live and do NOT need super low latency. I’m just a midi-tinkerer.

My S1 processing precision is also set to 32bit. Should I change that?

Thanks if you can help. Cheers, all.

2

Hi @DaveK58

thanks for posting this. There have been many reports of hung notes or other issues due to the Windows audio driver used.

Even as developers we get confused with those things. It seems to be highly dependent on the hardware setup and software configuration.

On my personal laptop, some drivers don’t work well with the integrated sound card. I am not too sure what to use either.

It would be greatly appreciated if someone had some resources on the subject :slight_smile:

3

Still encouraging feedback from members here, but this is a pretty good guide about using ASIO4ALL.

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/installing-and-using-asio4all-for-windows/

and another about Buffer size/sample rate/latency…

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/which-buffer-size-setting-should-i-use-in-my-daw/

4

I am using ASIO4ALL, not so much because of the latency of the Windows drivers (I am actually using the NI Komplete Audio 6 driver), but to be able to route audio & MIDI from various other sources. But the issue I have with ASIO4ALL is that it blocks my other Windows apps audio. Youtube videos won’t even run at all while the DAW is open with ASIO4ALL, so I constantly have to switch back and forth, or use VoiceMeeter

5

That sounds like kind of a PITA. Thx for the input, Bernd.

6

Just to add to this thread, in case anyone is interested, the consensus I get from the Studio 1 FB group is that I should skip ASIO4ALL and get an audio interface (there’s a relatively inexpensive PreSonus one), but that would probably mean ditching Windows audio completely and (without some fancy cabling) also getting some studio monitors, effectively retiring my Klipsch Promedia 2.1’s, which would be very disappointing for me. The cost of doing this isn’t prohibitive for me, but I’m a little reluctant to effectively re-configure my PC which (shockingly) I use for purposes other than recording mediocre midi music. Especially if practically all my VST’s run just fine.

7

I purchased my machine from a company which spec builds pro-audio boxes based in Intel and AMD. As a matter of course they disable the Windows audio drivers, and I was told that they did this because (a) they had frequent problems with pro software and (b) they assumed that the buyers would use the ASIO drivers provided by the hardware interface vendor.
As another indication on the complexity of what can impact on what, I had multiple problems with the MOTU 828 ASIO drivers. They were eventually tracked down to ‘Bonjour’; I removed this and all was then well.

8

For integrated sound cards, it seems driver issues can take forever to be fixed. Leaving users with bugs and little help to know what’s going on.

thanks @DaveK58 for posting those guides