Small USB Asio Sound Card?

[Scott Kendrick]

Curious... does anyone use a small USB soundcard that has Asio drivers for mixing? I have a scarlett 2i2 in my studio but just looking for something small when I'm remote, don't need any inputs or outputs even... just something that has more juice to power cakewalk and plugins so I can mix disconnected.

Thanks!

[msmcleod]

4 minutes ago, Scott Kendrick said:

Would love to know other ways to improve. Curious if you are doing anything special with power settings (like do you specifically need to switch to high performance mode or is balance md fine??)

You absolutely have to switch to high performance mode to get any decent performance in audio applications. 

Software synths & effects are almost 100% reliant on CPU power.

[msmcleod]

If all I'm doing is mixing, then using the onboard sound device in one of the WASAPI modes works fine for me on my laptop.  I just plug my headphones directly into the laptop.

Whether to use WASAPI Exclusive or WASAPI Shared is down to a number of factors:

WASAPI Exclusive

• Low latency
• Cakewalk will completely take over the audio device, so you can't have other apps using audio. Checking "Suspend Audio Engine When Cakewalk Is Not in Focus" in Preferences->Audio->Playback and Recording can be used to mitigate this to an extent... but it can be annoying if you accidentally switch to some other application, and Cakewalk stops playing, so I tend to not have this option checked.
• Cakewalk normally has full control over sample rate/bit depth, assuming the onboard device fully supports exclusive mode.
• Not all on-board devices support this mode

WASAPI Shared

• Higher latency
• Audio device is shared with all other applications
• You may need to manually change the sample rate/bit depth in Windows audio to match your Cakewalk project
• Supported by almost all on board audio devices

 

[Byron Dickens]

Cakewalk is not "powered" by the audio interface.

That interfere is about as small as they come.

 

[Scott Kendrick]

I have a pretty decent powered laptop but if I have any more than one or two instruments or a reasonable number of effects, I can't do anything in cakewalk with Wasapi... Choppy audio, complete drop outs .. I will try exclusive and see if any better but pretty sure I tried that before with no luck. As soon as I plugin my Scarlett and switch to Asio, no problems... Plus it gives me the option to increase the buffer when things get really heavy. Thought I saw a small sound blaster USB device and thought it might have Asio support. The onboard realtek seems completely incapable.

Would love to know other ways to improve. Curious if you are doing anything special with power settings (like do you specifically need to switch to high performance mode or is balance md fine??)

[Scott Kendrick]

ah.. ok great to know. See the weird thing is, my Dell doesn't even give me the option for high performance mode OR creating high performance profiles. I chatted with Dell support, and while they didn't solve it, they did give me a command I can run that puts into high performance mode. I'll give that a shot!

[Scott Kendrick]

yep - that did it

 

[John Vere]

Sound Blaster is a bad word around here!  

If you still have issues run Latency Monitor and sort out optimizing your laptop. 

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon