I’ll be traveling now and then in the nearish future, and I could see doing some editing/mixing in Cubase 14 Pro on my Microsoft Surface Pro 6, without my interface.
I was wondering which of the ASIO drivers that appear in my drop down window would be the best … if that’s even a reasonable question?
Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver
ASIO4ALL v2
Steinberg built in ASIO Driver
Yamaha Studio USB ASIO
ReaRoute ASIO (x64)
iConnectivity ASIO Driver (Surface Pro is PC)
Even if there is not a definite one better than the other sort of thing, how should I choose?
The only right answer is for you to try them and see which works best for you and your system. If you’re lucky they all just work and it’s difficult to tell if there is any difference performance wise among them.
Each one might offer different options/features/abilities of which you might or might not need/use.
Over the years I have gravitated to ASIO4ALL, but merely because it’s the first one I tried aside from the ones that ship with Steinberg hosts, it worked, and allowed me to aggregate some things into a DAW on a laptop like USB mics.
ASIO4ALL is very ‘tweakable’. In advanced mode you can manually adjust all sorts buffer sizes and such to optimization for your particular system.
The Steinberg ones that come with their hosts work well, but seem to be 16bit, there isn’t much you can tweak out manually, and it doesn’t offer features to aggregate devices.
^^
If I would be in the situation of Alexis, I would use ASIO4ALL. Like you, I don’t know though if it is the best option nowadays, but it the best that I know.
If the audiochip is realtek there is a realtek asio driver floating around on the net made for Dell but works on my Lenovo laptop too and is better then all others which are more layered on top of the een driver, this is a real driver. It is somewhat difficult to find and you have to follow the specific install instructions.
My ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero came with Realtek ASIO drivers but I never could figure out how to make them work. I couldn’t find ‘instructions’ on the stuff. Didn’t really need it anyway since it has better interfaces connected.
Still, a bit curious. Is there a link somewhere on getting these to work?
I tried asio4all on my son’s laptop which seemed to work well. If latency isn’t going to be a problem then any will do as long as it works. You can definitely get lower latency on asio4all than a generic driver
@Brian_Roland - forgive my ignorance please - does that mean all my DAW work while using Steinberg’s ASIO driver will be in 16 bit, even if I’ve set it to 24-bit in the Cubase Project window, and Cubase internally works at 32- bit?
I use ASIO4ALL on my laptop, even though it has realtek audio chip the realtek´s ASIO didn´t work well, same goes pretty much all of the other ASIO drivers
Of note they say they are not going to develop the Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver any more:
"The Steinberg built-in ASIO Driver is a new development that was initially released with WaveLab Cast 2 in July 2023. It will gradually replace the Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver, which will not be further developed.
The functionality of both drivers is basically the same. The Steinberg built-in ASIO Driver essentially offers these advantages:
