Open source licensing for ASIO at last!

[Starship Krupa]

https://www.proaudio.tech/news/broadcast/new-steinberg-asio-open-source-license-for-obs-partnership

I think this means that when Audacity 4.0 ships, it can legally include ASIO support. That's pretty huge.

[mettelus]

That is rather interesting, as it is focused on OBS. PreSonus actually wrote proprietary OBS ASIO drivers for their hardware (and has recommended OBS but never officially sponsored them), so is nice to see that functionality will be open to everyone now.

This may actually mean that RealTek's ASIO drivers may actually work in the future too!

[Wookiee]

2 hours ago, mettelus said:

This may actually mean that RealTek's ASIO drivers may actually work in the future too!

Aren't Microsoft releasing a Windows native ASIO driver?

[msmcleod]

1 hour ago, Wookiee said:

Aren't Microsoft releasing a Windows native ASIO driver?

Yes, they are... but from what I gather it's several months away.

Also, their priority is releasing a native driver for ARM64 - the reason being, that they want people to adopt the platform, and they realise that hardware manufacturers will need time to develop/test/release their own native drivers.

So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Windows ASIO drivers on x64.  Also bear in mind that good manufacturers will tweak their drivers to their specific hardware, whereas Microsoft will be focusing on something that will work reasonably well on all hardware.

[mettelus]

3 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Also bear in mind that good manufacturers will tweak their drivers to their specific hardware, whereas Microsoft will be focusing on something that will work reasonably well on all hardware.

This is really the crux of it all, since the input side is where things get tricky. RealTek has always been more focused on the output side so my comment was a bit more sarcastic, but is a never say never scenario.

PreSonus' Revelator mics are actually audio interfaces (with FAT Channel XT included in the mixer), which is why they are so big. What totally shocked me at one point testing them was I got some hefty lag (from one ASIO input)... other than that it didn't miss a beat. Turns out I had opened a Cakewalk project at a different sampling rate than everything else, but the mic just kept on chugging along. Once I realized that I was thinking "that shouldn't work," but I was rather impressed that it did. Melodyne requires massive buffers to run, so the same trick buried Melodyne (it crashed out to desktop)... the workaround for that was I played that back through the RealTek chip (via speakers) and recorded it into the microphone. Again, RealTek is geared toward output consistency, but this may open the doors on mixing opportunities in the future. As Mark said, don't hold your breath. Caveat to this... I did not do any testing with OBS, I was using PreSonus' Universal Control to do the grunt work and sending one ASIO output to Camtasia.

Edited Monday at 04:21 PM by mettelus

[Starship Krupa]

10 hours ago, mettelus said:

This may actually mean that RealTek's ASIO drivers may actually work in the future too!

When the announcement was made a year ago(!) about the push at MS to do their own ASIO driver and retool their USB stack to make for better streaming performance, I got the impression that this new ASIO was going to replace WASAPI as the low latency class-compliant option.

So a lot of interfaces, Realtek's included, will be able to use ASIO without requiring any 3rd party driver.

I hoped that we non-developers would see something by now, a year after the announcement. I check the project's Discord server from time to time and there have been no other public announcements, it's all back and forth chatter between Microsoft's team and developers with the SDK.

Since ASIO is now open source, it might finally allow a 3rd party project to create a better ASIO driver for the Realtek CODEC's. Something that's not just a wrapper like ASIO4ALL or ASIO2WASAPI. Although any prospective developer of such a thing would have to weigh the value of doing it in light of MS' announcement that they're working on the class-compliant driver.

It remains to be seen how many of WASAPI's issues will be solved with their driver. I'm thinking of the timing errors for overdubbing.