Anyone using ASIO4ALL without an audio interface?

[JeffLearman]

In some cases ASIO4ALL is better than WDM.

In other cases not.

ASIO4ALL is not really a ASIO driver. It is an advanced WDM driver, so to speak

Summary: ASIO4ALL rocks and is a huge improvement over WDM drivers, in terms of latency.  It should definitely make built-in sound work for JK, whereas WDM has no chance of being able to participate.

Gory details

I have been using ASIO4ALL since about 2003, on about 8 different laptops, and have always found it to deliver low latency using built-in hardware, with a wide variety of hardware.  I used it for playing keyboard softsynths live (using Hermann Seib's VSTHost or Cantabile) as well as home recording (with nTrack and Reaper)*.  In the early years, the biggest issue was needing relatively large buffers due to relatively slow CPUs and higher PCI bus latency.  As time went on, with big improvements in both those areas, the buffer size came down dramatically.  No doubt there's additional latency over and above the buffering, but not enough to notice when playing.

With WDM drivers, latency is terrible and way too bad to play softsynths live, and WAY too bad to use for audio loopback (e.g., electric guitar with software amp/cab sim).

I haven't measured WDM latency (why bother) but I'd guess it's at least 100 ms one way (so, 200 ms round-trip which is what we need to worry about with JK.)  With ASIO4ALL, I measured it long ago and don't remember the details but guess it was around 10ms one way.  That's a huge improvement, and hopefully these days we can use much smaller buffers and reduce that dramatically, to get the round-trip latency well under 20 ms.

I'm tempted to measure its latency on my current Lenova Yoga, or the Dell XPS 9500 I use for work and not audio.

In any case, I plan to jam with a buddy who doesn't have an audio interface and plan to set him up using ASIO4ALL.  There's no other option, without adding hardware.  I'll post back with results.

*Why would I use it for recording?  Sometimes my MOTU 828 was working; sometimes it wasn't.

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* uncheck exclusive mode. If you have several devices listed, you will need to do this for each of them.
* Right click on Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth and select Disable device and click Yes to confirm the action. Reboot the computer. The GS wavetable shares the same port as ASIO4ALL and may conflict with it and prevent it from running correctly.

I never had to do that. But I did have to close any apps using audio. These days who knows how many audio-grabbing gremlins live under the covers!

BTW I did use ASIO recently, on the Lenovo Yoga, before I got a Focusrite Scarlett. I had lost all my gear in one of the CA fires.