If you have never used the ASIO sound drivers in Windows, then you have not experienced high quality sound output experience yet. ASIO stands for Audio Stream Input/Output and is a standard developed by the German company Steinberg Media Technologies. The benefit of using ASIO is that it can access the hardware directly and thus avoids any issues usually encountered when using the regular sound card drivers. But one of the problems with using ASIO is that you can this interface only through an ASIO supporting application and not many such applications exist.
ASIO support. Provides ASIO output support. Version 2.1.2 highlights:. Fixed phase inversion with 32-bit output. Please note that this component is meant for systems where ASIO is the only available output method. It is highly recommended to use the default output modes instead of ASIO.
There is one music player application for Windows called Foobar2000 that does support ASIO and here is how you can configure Foobar2000 to use ASIO drivers:
- First of all install ASIO4ALL sound drivers in your Windows PC. These drivers do not replace your regular sound drivers, but are used only by ASIO enabled applications.
- Download the latest version of Foobar2000 and install it in your Windows PC.
- Download the ASIO Support component for Foobar and save it somewhere in your computer.
- Launch Foobar2000, click on File in the menubar and select Preferences from there. You can also use the hotkey Ctrl+P .
- In the preferences window, select Components and then click on the Install button. Choose the foo_out_asio.fb2k-component file that you downloaded in the step 3 above. It will install the ASIO support component and restart Foobar2000.
- Once again open the preferences like in the step 4 above. In the preferences, select Playback → Output and then choose ASIO4ALL as the output device. Click on the OK button.
- Restart Foobar2000 and you are ready to play the music through the ASIO interface. Make sure you use good quality headphones like the ones from Beats by Dre or Grado in order to experience the improvement in quality of the sound output.
When you play the music through ASIO4ALL sound drivers, you will see a small icon in the system tray of Windows desktop. You can click on this icon to configure the various settings for ASIO4ALL.
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At 2/4/13 01:16 PM, SoulofT wrote:Maybe I should be posting this in the FL Studio thread but ASIO4ALL is general so i thought I would make a new thread for this. Well, I've always used ASIO4ALL when making tracks, usually to avoid the 'buzzing' sound, glitching and lag which occurs sometimes with my native soundcard. When I've used it in the past, I've always seen a volume drop from the soundcard used; however this wasn't such a BIG volume difference. About 2 weeks ago, (without me changing any of the settings/hardware), I switched to ASIO4ALL and I could hardly hear the volume. I tried raising the volume from FL Studio but there's only so much you can do before it becomes distorted.
Any ideas why this happened and what could be done as a solution??
Check the Windows Audio Settings, make sure the soundcard is enabled (although you use ASIO, the settings there still can affect the sound). Check which output channels you have selected. Also check if your ASIO settings panel shows you any errors (http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/envsettings_a sio4all.htm).