I’ve heard of ASIO4ALL, do I need to install it? This will reduce potential problems such as stuttering and lag especially under high CPU loads. ASIO can be a very important part of the recording process because it provides a fast path to your hardware. Whether you use a digital audio workstation, DJ software, or other type of tool for audio production, you need to be able to carry out multi-channel recordings without any latency problems. Why is it important for music production? A system using ASIO will therefore have much lower latency, better synchronisation, and achieve higher audio performance.
Using the correct ASIO driver on your computer provides software applications, such as a DAW, a direct way of accessing all the I/O ports on your sound card or external audio interface. The main purpose of this audio protocol is to solve the problem of excessive audio latency (lag) by bypassing the operating system’s built-in audio mixing. Incidentally the company also invented the VST audio plug-in standard along with their popular Cubase DAW (digital audio workstation) application. It is an audio interfacing protocol which was first developed by Steinberg (a music software and hardware company) in 1997. It is an acronym which stands for Audio Streaming Input Output. In this ASIO FAQ article discover what this audio term means, its purpose in music production, and whether you actually need to install an ASIO driver to keep audio latency to a minimum. I can now create songs and beats on my laptop without an external USB audio interface.Article last updated: Signal Corps / Wikimedia Commons Apart from that everything is working awesome. When I unplug headphones during ASIO playback, the audio app may even crash. If I plug headphones, the app will continue to use the laptop speaker. The only issue I have experienced: When an app is using the ASIO hardware, I cannot plug/unplug headphones.
The reason is probably that those generic ASIO drivers do not really connect to the hardware, they just create even one more layer in order to simulate an ASIO device which is actually running with a normal windows audio driver. Before the ASIO drivers I could hardly play or record a few simple audio tracks.
With a proper buffer setting I can now playback complex audio sessions in Cubase Pro and FL Studio with many synths and effect plugins. I have less latency and CPU load went down to normal. In my case the official Realtek ASIO driver from the DELL driver pack really boosted my audio performance. The advantage of using the official Realtek ASIO driver Next time you start up your audio or video app you will find a new ASIO driver in the audio hardware settings. From this folder run the install.exeand restart your computer.After extraction in the folder you will find an folder called ASIO.Next you will chose an empty folder to extract the driver.In the first setup step select extractinstead of install.Save the file (Audio_Driver_…exe) on your computer and double-click to run it.Go to the DELL audio driver for Realtek download (The description should say ‘Added the support for Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) driver protocol’).
How to download & install Realtek ASIO drivers:Īttention: Before installing I recommend to make a full backup of your computer system. So you can think of the ASIO component as kind of an driver add-on, that can be used with multiple Realtek audio devices. Of course I had some doubts in the first place but turned out the ASIO driver also works like a charm on my HP and on other computers such as ASUS etc. Sidenote: ASIO is a professional audio standard (similar to Apple Core Audio) and enables media software to have direct access to the audio hardware.Īfter a lot more research I finally found an dedicated ASIO driver for Realtek in a driver pack for DELL laptops. None of them really improved the audio performance of my system. ? Then of course I tried generic ASIO drivers such as ASIO4ALL and the FL Studio ASIO driver. Since it wasn’t really handy to always use an USB audio, I started to try a few things: At first I contacted Realtek and HP if they can provide an official ASIO driver but turned out that support staff did not even understand what an ASIO driver is. So it was pretty obvious: The problem was caused by my integrated Realtek HD audio device, which didn’t have a native ASIO driver. Whenever I used an USB audio interface with ASIO support, the performance was like 10x better. Since I got my HP ProBook I was pretty happy except for one problem: Multimedia apps such as Premiere Pro, FL Studio, Cubase or Studio One always had serious performance problems (high latency, CPU spikes and dropouts). ASIO is usually available for professional studio hardware only, but also for Realtek integrated sound devices aka. For music production and video editing an ASIO driver can boost your system’s performance.