Noobie question...

LionelHutz

Hi, I've been using kx drivers for a couple of weeks now and I LOVE IT. It's the best.
I'm not having any problems except for a few games but that's unimportant.
I just want to know this: What exactly are "ASIO drivers"? I'm asking because I'm curious about it and want to know what can I do with them.
I have a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1, my PC is an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (thoroughbred). 512 mb of RAM and a couple of 7200 RPM IDE HDs.
I use mainly FLStudio, and today I was messing with the settings and found "ASIO" on the output devices, I selected it and couldn't believe my eyes! FLStudio is very laggy, I usually have it set on 1000 ms when using directaudio or the standar windows output, but using ASIO I was able to bring the latency down to 5 ms!! And I was using tons of FX and a big polyphony!
Why is this possible? What are these miracolous ASIO drivers and what do the do?
Is there any other way I can use them? Maybe as an output device on Winamp or Foobar? Is there an advantage to it?
I'm sorry if this question is very lame but I'm only curious!

Nando Dominguez

Hi,

"ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output), developed by Steinberg, is a cross-platform, multi-channel audio transfer protocol that is being adopted by many of the manufacturers of audio/MIDI sequencing applications. It allows software to have access to the multi-channel capabilities of a wide range of powerful sound cards.
ASIO expands on the basic capabilities of a standard computer sound card, most of which can only provide stereo (two-channel) audio input and output. The ASIO specification defines the interface that manufacturers of professional audio sound cards must use to create an ASIO driver for their hardware. This driver allows the host audio/MIDI application to "see" all of the inputs and outputs available on the sound card. The user can then assign these I/O ports as needed for recording or playback when using an ASIO-compatible software program. This allows the users to record more tracks simultaneously than the previous limitation of two channels imposed by a standard sound card."

Apart from this you can get very lower latencies, and almost unlimited routing capabilities when used with sophisticated drivers like kX. You'll get three stereo independent outputs with a SBlive and it's getting better day by day. Have a look at Dj_Stick Quick Start Guide here:

http://kb.kxproject.lugosoft.com/guide/index.html

LionelHutz

Thanks for replying so quickly Nando (Fernando?)

So basically ASIO is this really awesome driver that does all those marvelous things.
I just pluged in my midi keyboard and again, I was shocked! It is just great to be able to record with 2 ms of delay on FLStudio while listening to the song without turning off any instruments or effects. I can't believe I've been missing on this for so long!

I guess I'll have to give that guide another read! And get one of those ASIO controllers...

Thanks for the help, and I'll probably be back with some more questions (after the finals)

dj_stick

im not sure what you mean by ASIO controllers… if FL is asio compatible… and you have kX, you need nothing more

LionelHutz

Yes sir, you are correct. FL seems to support ASIO just fine.
And btw, great job on the starters guide!

dj_stick

i just hope the guide can help you

peate

Speaking of the quick start guide, is there a way to download the whole set of documents as one file?

Great job btw.

Pierre

PS I just upgraded my PC and kx sounds even better still. UnReal.

Pierre

dj_stick

this is the second request for the guide to be downloadable - i'll see what i can do… i'll see if i can get the script and css off the website to encode it…

Eugene Gavrilov

probably, a better idea would be a .pdf generated using Adobe Acrobat

/E

dj_stick

i agree… but that requires adobe acrobat… and quite a few formatting changes… i'll look into it when i have the time