ASIO4ALL 2.9 has just been released

Yes it's another official release of ASIO4ALL by Michael Tippach and it's working better than ever on Windows Vista! As I mentioned in a previous blog I use this with Ableton Live when on the move. Works really well. Perhaps not quite the same sound quality as my Lexicon Alpha but that's not ASIO4ALL's fault. That's the limitations of my built in sound interface in my laptop.

To give you a bit more of an idea of what ASIO4ALL does (or indeed any ASIO driver) it's all to do with latency. That is, the time it takes for the computer to a) work out that you've pressed a key on your MIDI keyboard, b) work out what sort of sound to send to the speakers, and c) actually get the sound to the speakers. Because computers are general purpose devices it can take a while for all this to happen. When I say a while I'm talking about milliseconds and although that sounds small it is quite noticeable when you're actually playing a virtual instrument. So what we need to do is to get that delay time to be as small as possible without overloading the computer. That's what ASIO drivers a for... they're specially optimised bits of software that keep those computer audio latencies as "under control" as possible. Until ASIO4ALL came along one would have to buy special audio hardware to get the low latencies.

Traditional MIDI keyboards/synths have latencies that are so small that we can't notice them. So if you're not using audio (including the metronome) in your sequencing software (only MIDI messages to your keyboard) then you generally don't need to worry about all this latency stuff. All the sound will be coming from your keyboard.

So that's a little bit about latencies to celebrate ASIO4ALL's new release. You can download it from the ASIO4ALL web site.