Your main goal is to be able to hear the audio from Cubase and Windows at the same time.
There are things you should know about ASIO drivers, although this is general knowledge that some people have and some don’t. You would then say where is that documented? Well, obviously not in Cubase documentation. Cubase user manual only shows you what is inherent to Cubase, it won’t teach you anything about your system configuration or third-party drivers/software.
Some ASIO drivers are not multi-client compatible. That means the inputs and outputs used by this driver cannot be used by other applications at the same time.
That is the case with Cubase’s Generic Low Latency ASIO driver. With this driver, you will never be able to hear the audio from both Cubase and Windows simultaneously. You are able to hear one at a time and that requires to activate Release Driver when Application is in Background. When Cubase window loses focus, it then unloads the driver and makes the inputs and outputs available for Windows. When you focus back on Cubase, the driver will have to load again. This is completely independent of any audio settings that can be done in Windows. You cannot workaround this behavior.
Nowadays the great majority of ASIO drivers are multi-client compatible, which includes ASIO4ALL (In its latest release and Windows 10/11).
It means that any input and output loaded by that driver can be used simultaneously by Cubase, Windows, other software, and even other multi-client compatible ASIO drivers (ASIO4ALL even allows multiple instances).
The only things such a configuration requires are :
- The sample-rate must match
- Any exclusive modes must be disabled
You obviously do not want that box to be checked when using a multi-client driver.
Using ASIO4ALL was the right thing to do but your system isn’t configured the right way.
Although my guide contains screenshots that are in French, you don’t even need to read or understand what’s on the images, I posted that as a reference for what people should get on their screen, when they are following the steps I wrote in English. I didn’t really thought that it could prevent you to reach to the same dialog boxes and modify the relevant settings. What’s difficult in that?