Omer Pomerantz

TL;DR - Realtek ASIO hangs Cakewalk, disable Realtek in windows sound devices, uncheck Realtek ASIO in Cakewalk both input and output, This will enable choice of other ASIO devices in Cakewalk so now you can choose your own The longer version: This thread helped me solve a very annoying problem when I installed Cakewalk on a new laptop. Took a lot of time, effort and frustration, but I finally managed to solve it with the help of this excellent thread and linked resources. Here is my problem and solution, I hope it can help others as well: Got a new i7 laptop pre-installed with Win11 Installed the latest Behringer drivers for my UMC204HD (good old work-horse of an audio interface, which got updated drivers lately). Installed Cakewalk. Went to Preferences -> audio setup. Was very surprised to find a realtek ASIO driver already present . which almost immediately caused Cakewalk to hang so I couldn't disable it... After a lot of trial&error (and reading here and research), disabled realtek in the Windows settings->sound->devices, and managed to switch Cakewalk to WASAPI and using the UMC204HD. Interesting to note (like the original post here) that the realtek ASIO driver kept showing up, and when the realtek ASIO is enabled and Realtek is enabled in windows, it hangs Cakewalk. However, when realtek is disabled Cakewalk can run. With WASAPI I confirmed that all is working, and then switched to ASIO while realtek is still disabled. Cakewalk automatically selected realtec ASIO for both input and output, and showed the UMC as greyed-out option. But it didn't hang. After unchecking Realtek from both input and output, the UMC ASIO became enabled, so I could choose and then VOILA - all is working I do wish Realtek ASIO was a real thing, as it could provide an excellent mobile experience without the need for an external ASIO-enabled audio interface. From what I read it seems we are not there yet Thank you again for all the contributors here - really helped me debug and solve the issue I had.