I'm late to the game, but want to chime in here as someone who has owned, but not really used, almost every version of Cakewalk products since the early 90's.
If you don't have true ASIO equipment, but really need ASIO support, please check out FlexASIO. It's a very decent and FLEXible ASIO implementation that gives users the ability to choose the underlying sound driver to be wrapped by ASIO, as well as latency, exclusive/shared mode, etc. It even offers the ability to create and use a loopback driver, to emulate Windows "what you hear" feature.
The Realtek headphone jack on my MSI laptop suddenly stopped working properly one day, resulting in the volume on that jack being super, super low. After restoring my machine to factory settings, and trying every driver version I could get my hands on, I finally gave up and bought a great $20 USB audio adapter so that I never have to deal with Realtek issues again.
Of course, the USB audio adapter doesn't have ASIO drivers - it doesn't have any drivers, which is why I love it! However, that also makes it impossible for me to use Dimension Pro and Rapture Sessions in standalone mode, etc., because they only support outputting to ASIO.
I used ASIO4ALL, which worked well enough, but I'm not keen on giving up exclusive control of my audio device to a single application. I'm jumping back into DAW for the first time in a decade, and I want to be able to watch YouTube videos at the same time as messing around with the DAW features. FlexASIO lets me do that easily.
Also, for some reason, I'm irrationally offended by ASIO4ALL's super annoying website banner at the top of their website pages, as well as the proliferation of fake "Start Download" ads on their site that predatorily try to infect novice computer users with malware.
Some day, I may choose to buy a USB audio adapter that has great ASIO support, at which point I'd be grateful for anyone who has recommendations for which product to look at. Thanks!
