A few thingz


Joseph Basquin


21/11/2024

#windows


Low latency audio on a Windows PC with the built-in soundcard

Update: if you're into sampling or beatmaking, here is how to remove drums from a song!

 

So you want to use your music production software, with low latency on your PC/Windows laptop?

You have basically two options:

Michael Tippach's ASIO4ALL is incredibly useful for the PC music community since more than 10 years, because it turns your cheap computer's built-in soundcard into a low-latency one! With ASIO4ALL, you can plug a MIDI keyboard and play piano or synth with no "delay". Without it, the delay of more than 50 ms between the keypress and the sound makes it nearly impossible to play.

But ASIO4ALL has one major drawback: it's not multi-client. This means that if your DAW is open with ASIO4ALL as sound driver, then, if you open:

... then it won't work: the audio is not available for them: your DAW and ASIO4ALL have locked your soundcard.

This is really annoying and I can't count how many hours of my life I wasted since 10 years to find a solution for this (every few months/years I retried and retried and benchmarked every new method). (Ok switching to Mac would have been a faster solution...)

The real difficulty is that we would like to use

Setup (1): A music software in ASIO + a standard application like Firefox using the so-called Windows WDM driver

Here is a list of things I tried, unsuccessfully:

Now, promising solutions:

Now, a working solution (update 2019):

Interested for future evolutions and other (audio) tools?

 

 

How to create symbolic links with Windows Explorer?

Quick tip: here is how to create symlinks in Windows without using any command line tool.

Create symbolic links with a GUI

1) If you have Python installed, create mklinkgui.py:

import win32clipboard    # pip install pywin32 if you haven't installed it already
import sys, os, subprocess
fname = sys.argv[1]
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
filenames = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData(win32clipboard.CF_HDROP)
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
for filename in filenames:
    base = os.path.basename(filename)
    link = os.path.join(fname, base)
    subprocess.Popen('mklink %s "%s" "%s"' % ('/d' if os.path.isdir(filename) else '', link, filename), shell=True)

2) Open regedit and

How to use it?

My blog – Joseph Basquin

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Available for freelancing: Python expert / R&D / Automation / Embedded / Audio / Data / UX

I create products such as SamplerBox, YellowNoiseAudio, Jeux d'orgues, this blogging engine, etc.

Articles about: #all, #music, #opensource, #python.