WHY DO YOU NEED AN AUDIO DEVICE?
In order to record your music on a computer, you must plug your instrument or microphone into an audio device that is connected to your computer. A driver helps that device talk to your computer. These drivers are called ASIO on Windows and Core Audio on a Mac OS.
MAC OS X CORE AUDIO
Mac OS X Core Audio integrates a range of audio functionality directly into the operating system. The Core Audio HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) allows multiple applications to share the same device, while maintaining ultra-low latency performance.
Many new intel macs including the MacBookPro publish their inputs and outputs as separate devices. Since RiffWorks needs both input and output devices to be synchronized, it can't support this behavior directly. However, Apple has provided a way to aggregate two or more devices into a single device. * Launch Audio Midi Setup (found in /Applications/Utilities) * From the Audio Menu choose Open Aggregate Device Editor * Click the plus button to add a new aggregate device * Check built-in input and built-in output * Double click on the name of the device to change it to something easy to understand like "built-in" * Click Done * Quit Audio Midi Setup RiffWorks should now recognize your built-in sound as a valid device.
WIN XP ASIO
Steinberg created the ASIO driver because Microsoft's MM (multimedia) sound drivers didn't originally even do full-duplex (in and out at the same time.) MS made Direct Sound next but that had ridiculous latency when it came out, like 100 milliseconds or worse. Then some guys at Cakewalk worked with Microsoft to expose the Kernel Streaming to developers (mainly them at first) so that they could get lower latency without using ASIO drivers on every day sound cards. The majority of built-in sound cards on motherboards were spec'd by accountants for being the cheapest possible, like less than $2.
So, why does RiffWorks only support ASIO drivers? ASIO drivers are written by companies that are tailoring their devices (and the drivers) to recording music. There are so so many cheap sound cards out there in the world, it would be impossible to make RW work smoothly with all of them. The other audio drivers don't have latency reporting, which makes recording in sync nearly impossible. So, by limiting our support to ASIO drivers, we can provide the best possible experience and support any problems that come up.
There are many ASIO devices to choose from starting at less that $100 up to around $200 or more, USB or Firewire, with mic preamps, phantom power, nice headphone amps to drive higher end head-phones, and analog volume knobs, so you can control your volume quickly and easily with out hunting for a control panel.
If audio hardware comes with an ASIO device, then that usually means that the manufactures intend for that hardware to be used in high performance low latency audio applications like RiffWorks. Some devices have ASIO, but still have lots of problems with low latency applications. ThatŐs why we have a Recommended Hardware List on our website.
RiffWorks Standard supports ASIO. That doesn't mean that every sound card is supported. ASIO4ALL really tests the limits of your sound hardware, and we can't promise that it will work at all.
-If a peice of audio hardware comes with an ASIO interface then it could work with RiffWorks.
-If a peice of audio hardware is on our recommended list then we have tested this hardware and verified that everything is working ok.
-Some applications (including RiffWorks) will sometimes (sometimes not) work with ASIO4ALL.
ASIO4All is a wrapper that takes a kernel streaming driver and puts an ASIO face on it. It does work for some devices, but not all of them. And of those that do work, the latency may be reported wrong from within ASIO4All. We won't support problems with ASIO4All, we just can't afford to. .
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