RME Hammerfall DSP Multiface (PCMCIA - ASIO 2.0, Win, Mac, Mac OS X, plus MIDI) They list off many external multi-channel soundcards such as:Įcho Indigo DJ (PCMCIA - ASIO 2.0, Win, Mac, Mac OS X) Is multi-channel the same as muliti-client? I searched for soundcards and the only thing that came up was which soundcard is needed to setup traktor dj studio. Okay I'm browsing their products, but I don't think Native Instruments makes soundcards. I think that Native Instruments audio interfaces provide Multi-Client drivers, as well (Not sure on this one, though. RME and Echo have Multi-Client ASIO drivers. Each of these 'virtual soundcards' can still have only one program accessing it at a time.įor example, one 'virtual soundcard' might have FL Studio assigned to it through ASIO, another 'virtual soundcard' has the Windows Mixer assigned to it through WDM, yet another 'virtual soundcard' might be playing a video game's audio back through DirectX, etc. This feature exists only on some native drivers because it relies on several 'virtual soundcards' which exist on the physical soundcard whose audio is mixed together before reaching your speakers. Some native (not emulated!) ASIO drivers have a feature commonly known as 'Multi-client mixing' which allows for ASIO streams and Windows Mixer streams to co-exist. ASIO drivers allow for only one application to control the sound card (like how DirectX gives a game direct control over your video card - ASIO is basically the audio equivalent of DirectX).

In order to provide this hardware-level link, the Windows Mixer must be bypassed. WDM drivers (Your 'Primary Sound Driver' in FL) have to go through several layers of Windows APIs to deliver the audio (Tell Windows to make the sound, Windows passes the request to a driver stack, Windows mixer mixes it in with other audio, etc.).ĪSIO drivers, on the other hand, provide a hardware-level link between the soundcard and the audio software. Specifically, ASIO4All is a ASIO wrapper around the low-performance WDM drivers for your onboard soundcard - as such, it's an emulation rather than a true ASIO driver. As bandcoach mentioned, ASIO4All is a generic driver.

Asio4all crashes fl studio