ASIO is a type of audio driver that is used on Windows to connect your audio interface
to a digital audio workstation, and other audio software.
ASIO is used by a lot of different digital audio workstations, both free and paid programs.
It’s supported by many different USB audio interfaces, and in my case I have a few different
options to demonstrate in this video.
Throughout this video, we’ll cover how to use ASIO for low latency audio in digital
audio workstations on Windows.
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ASIO stands for Audio Stream Input/Output, and this is a driver protocol for audio devices,
such as audio interfaces, that is used on Windows.
ASIO allows us to bypass the Windows sound driver software and communicate directly with
the audio interface.
Getting rid of this setup in between helps reduce some of the latency.
Latency is basically just a delay between the time that the sound is created, such as
the instrument that’s connected to the computer, and the time it’s processed and played back
through the headphones.
Any sort of latency when recording can be a major problem, since it can throw off our
timing during a performance.
As you’re playing, you’re hearing back the music later than you expect it to be,
and you keep constantly trying to readjust to the new timing you’re hearing, so everything
gets messed up.
Of course, if you can’t hear yourself playing in the headphones, and only listen to the
reference track, then you can get around this, but that’s also a problem since of course
you can’t hear what you play, and then you can also make mistakes.
The solution is to use an ASIO driver, instead of the built in Windows drivers, to cut down
on latency and play in real-time, while listening to yourself play.
One of the ways some audio interfaces get around this problem is to allow hardware monitoring
to be enabled.
This means that the audio interface routes the input from the instrument directly to
the output for the headphones or the speakers.
This is controlled from software in the computer for how the routing is setup, but the actual
audio does not have to go through the computer first, so there’s no latency at all.
Keep in mind that not all audio interfaces will have an option to control this.
Both my Focusrite audio interfaces have these options, but there’s not as much control
on the less expensive Behringer audio interfaces.
A great thing about using low latency ASIO drivers, is that it allows for some signal
processing in real-time from the digital audio workstation, so we can get a processed signal
instead of the clean signal that we get from the audio interface on its own.
There’s a few different ways we can take advantage of this.
One is while recording vocals.
We can add plugins like compression, equalization, and a little bit of reverb to the track while
the singer is performing, and this will give us closer to the sound we’re trying to get
while it’s processed.
You may or may not want to do this, since it can cover up some imperfections in the
recording that you may want to try and improve upon by getting a better performance.
At the same time though, a little bit of reverb in the headphones may make some singers more
comfortable and allow them to give a better performance.
Without low latency monitoring with ASIO, the only other way to do this would be with
hardware reverb processors and recording the reverb, which is not ideal.
Another way this can be used is for processing electric guitars.
When an electric guitar is plugged directly into the audio interface, we just get a clean
direct signal.
This can be fine for some players, but others may want it to sound like it’s going through
an amp, especially if the song will be using high gain and distortion.
Little imperfections in the playing will actually be amplified in this case, instead of being
covered up like we have with singers, so it’s important to hear it as we go.
Many digital audio workstations come with plugins that simulate guitar amplifiers and
pedals to make this clean signal sound as if it were passing through an amp.
If your software doesn’t come with any of these plugins, there are some free ones available.
Usually, adding a few plugins to a track won’t add too much latency, but there are some plugins
that are particularly bad for this.
One of them is autotune.
A lot of autotune plugins require more time to process the signal, and only start to apply
after a certain amount of time, so they can have a bit of a delay.
In my opinion though, autotune is one of those things that is covering up mistakes.
Even if you do need to use it, only apply it after you’ve gotten the original recording
as good as it can be.
Even if you’re not connecting an audio interface, there can still be benefits to running an
ASIO driver in a digital audio workstation.
To do this, you would install the ASIO4ALL driver, and set it up to use the headphone
outputs from your computer as the audio output.
The advantage of using ASIO without an audio interface, is that it can be used with MIDI.
A MIDI keyboard over USB should respond immediately to the digital audio workstation, but there
can still be some delay in processing the sound that goes to your headphones.
In that case, you would hear with sound play a fraction of a second after hitting the notes.
With ASIO drivers, there may still be a small amount of latency, but it’s usually not
noticeable.
One more thing ASIO drivers can do is allow us to access all the inputs on our audio interface
at once.
With some of the default Windows drivers, we may only get a left and right input as
the microphone, so we only get the first two inputs from our audio interface.
ASIO can be used to unlock the rest of the inputs in the digital audio workstation.
So for example, my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 has 16 microphone inputs; 8 of them are built
into the audio interface itself, and 8 more are provided over an ADAT optical cable from
the Behringer ADA8000 preamp unit in my rack.
Now let’s get into how to actually use ASIO in our digital audio workstation.
This will vary depending on the program a little, but there’s a few general steps
to get this working that apply to most programs.
To get ASIO setup, connect your audio interface to the computer over USB before starting the
program.
Then, we need to install the drivers for the audio interface.
Some audio interfaces will have their own drivers, such as the Focusrite interfaces.
These give you more options for signal routing and controlling all the audio interface settings.
If these are available for your equipment, I would recommend using it.
Other audio interfaces will rely on the ASIO4ALL driver, which is more of a generic ASIO driver.
Start by downloading one of the drivers and installing it by running the program.
Next, start up the digital audio workstation.
The next steps will vary slightly depending on your audio interface and your software.
We’re starting with Reaper and then we’ll look at a few digital audio workstations as
well so you can get a general idea of the settings that will be available.
Once in the digital audio workstation, find the settings menu.
This is the step that will be different depending on the software, but it’s usually somewhere
in the top menus, and should be fairly easy to find.
From there, look for a setting referring to either audio or hardware of some sort.
Here we can find our settings under Audio and device.
At the top, we have a dropdown that allows us to select the Audio system.
Some may default to MME or windows direct sound, or even ASIO as the default.
We need to make sure this setting is set to ASIO.
Otherwise, we won’t be able to select an ASIO driver for the audio interface.
Then, select the specific driver.
We’ll see here I have a few different options.
This will differ depending on what audio interfaces you’re using.
The first one is ASIO4ALL, and that’s used for many different audio interfaces.
For example, I have my small Behringer UM2 audio interface that works with that driver.
It’s also used for some of my USB cables; I have a USB guitar cable and USB microphone
cable that can connect a guitar or microphone to the digital audio workstation without using
an audio interface.
This isn’t something I use all the time, but I found them interesting to experiment
with.
Both my Avid Eleven Rack and Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 audio interface have their own ASIO
drivers, so they don’t need to use ASIO4ALL.
This is basically all we need to do to select our audio interface.
If we’re using ASIO4ALL, we can go down to the ASIO Configuration button to open the
settings.
Most digital audio workstations will have some sort of option for this.
Here we can select our hardware inputs and outputs, and adjust the buffer size.
Buffer size is something we should consider now.
Having a high buffer size reduces the chance that your system will get overwhelmed by trying
to process the audio too quickly.
If that were to happen, you can get interruptions in the signal, leading to pops and clicks
in the sound.
A lot of times these can affect the input signal, not just what you’re hearing through
the headphones.
This means that the pops and clicks would be permanently recorded to the track.
However, if the buffer size is too high, you can get latency in the audio like we talked
about earlier.
Usually there will be a default setting that works well, but if you run into either latency
or pops and clicks, then this is a setting to consider adjusting.
Switching back to our Focusrite USB interface, we can see that the ASIO configuration brings
up the Focusrite window.
Again, we get to adjust the buffer size here that can be adjusted like with ASIO4ALL.
We can also set the hardware sample rate.
We’ll want to match this to our project.
In this case, both the project and the audio interface are set to 44.1 kHz, but this audio
interface supports up to 192 kHz.
This last step is not one that we’ll have to do for every digital audio workstation,
and that’s selecting which inputs and outputs are available.
Many digital audio workstations will just default to having all the inputs and outputs
enabled, and from there you would select them from your track.
In Reaper, it may default to only making some of the main inputs available.
To get the external inputs from the Behringer ADA8000 to be enabled, I would need to enable
them from the settings.
With all this done, we can click ok to save our settings.
Now we can insert an audio track and select our ASIO input on the track as the audio input.
We now have low latency audio and we can turn on input monitoring to hear it back.
So that covers Reaper, let’s now cover Cakewalk by BandLab really quickly to look at the similarities.
Once in the program, go to the Edit menu at the top and select Preferences from the bottom
of that menu.
This is similar to that settings menu we had opened earlier in Reaper.
Under audio on the left side, select Playback and Recording.
Here, we need to switch the Driver Mode to ASIO.
Now switch to devices.
Instead of a dropdown to select our device like we had in Reaper, we just check of the
device inputs and outputs from the list.
The software doesn’t let us select inputs and outputs from different devices.
To switch devices, we have to uncheck all the inputs and outputs from our current device,
then check off all the inputs and outputs for the new device.
Finally, driver settings is where we can find the ASIO control panel, either for ASIO4ALL,
or our device’s specific driver.
You may notice some settings here for changing the buffer size, but I recommend changing
that through your device’s settings through the ASIO Panel, instead of in the software
settings itself.
Sometimes changing the buffer size in this program can actually blue screen your computer,
and I’ve had that happen a few times, so make sure everything is saved first.
Now just hit Ok at the bottom to close the window, and we can select our inputs on a
track and start recording.
The last digital audio workstation we’ll cover in this video is Tracktion Waveform.
Whether you’re using the free or pro version, that won’t really matter.
It will all work the same way for setting up the audio interface with ASIO.
When we launch the program, go to Settings at the top left.
On the left, select Audio Devices.
Switch the Audio device type to ASIO.
Select the device as your audio interface or ASIO4ALL.
The sample rate and buffer size can be adjusted from the dropdown.
On the right side, we can enable or disable all our inputs and outputs.
Finally, at the bottom, we can open the control panel, which is that window for ASIO4ALL or
our audio interface’s specific driver that we saw in the last digital audio workstations.
Thanks for checking out this video on ASIO audio drivers for recording on Windows.
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