asio for laptop soundcards

I recently hit a problem with the sound output on my laptop, and a utility called Asio4all came to my rescue.

Read on ...My laptop has a built in soundcard (Yamaha AC-XG) but as far as my music software is concerned, it only has a crappy MME driver and a slightly less crappy DX driver. So when I first got the laptop I also got an M-Audio Audiophile USB. This gave me a nice low-latency ASIO driver.

This was OK while I was on Windows XP SP1, but in the autumn I finally had to upgrade to SP2. The Audiophile USB seemed to work OK at first, but then I found that it was randomly cutting out (sound would just completely stop) after about an hour of use (weirdly, the cut outs often seemed to coincide with the laptop's cooling fan stopping). I tried various versions of the Audiophile drivers, old and new, but it didn't help. Other people seem to have had similar problems. I always knew XP SP2 would get me somehow.

I considered buying another USB sound device, and searching around I found someone recommending Asio4all.

Asio4all is a generic freeware ASIO driver for WDM audio devices. Which means, most built-in laptop soundcards. It works via some clever software-based voodoo (WDM Kernel-Streaming or something) and although it doesn't work with all setups, its developer says is works for 5 out of 6 laptop/soundcard/software combinations.

I installed it, and tweaked the settings a bit, and I'm now getting 11ms latency from my laptop soundcard, instead of the 185ms latency I got with the MME one (the DX driver never seemed to work at all). And I don't have some honking great external USB audio interface with separate power supply sitting on my desk. So if you make music on a laptop, I'd recommend trying it.