The Yamaha Steinberg drivers for their interfaces are rock solid, though. I've only had like, five crashes in six years using them daily. Super low latency too, on par with every other interface on the market.

I had no idea that was a thing, my experience is all Windows and Linux, and every time someone mentions pro audio on Mac, they always say Mac doesn't need drivers. Unless Microsoft is willing to rewrite ASIO, then I doubt those specific drivers are going away anytime soon.

 

Last edited: Oct 2, 2025 at 3:06 AM

Wow, what a flame ! (the same news @ HA didn't - yet ? - received any reply)

Anyway I do believe that is an ARM-oriented strategy...

 

Low latency would be a good step forward but the most important part of core audio on mac is creating aggregate devices (combining multiple sources). Imo, they need a complete overhaul, optimization, and update of how audio works on windows.

 

This is misleading. The most important part of Core Audio is its low latency, high performance engine. Aggregate devices are a useful option for the small minority who need to combine multiple interfaces, but they’re not why Core Audio really matters.

In recent versions (Pro Tools 12+), when you select multiple Core Audio devices, Protools quietly creates what looks like an aggregate device under the hood. That’s not the same as going into Audio MIDI Setup and building one manually. Protools just builds a temporary device so you don’t have to mess with macOS settings. On HDX systems it skips Core Audio altogether and talks straight to the hardware.

Core Audio’s real strength is the low latency, reliable engine, and universal driver model. aggregate devices are just a niche tool almost nobody uses.

Let's see what MS churns out 20+ years too late. I'm getting as excited about this as I do when I see a new version of ASIO4ALL get released.

 

I hope it comes with its own control panel - you can never have enough control panels for sound in windows. Even though the hardest one to get to is the the one that works the best. Stupid microsoft stupid bloody audio.. also make sure it resets all the time when your monitor turns on or you plug in a usb device that has any sort of loose connection to sound - a usb coffee warmer with led lights that react to audio - yup, please just make that my default audio device you dicks. Grrrr.

 

In my opinion, MS is in a bind when it comes to audio plumbing. They could have made it and said that "come Win10 WASAPI is all you get, and fuck the rest", and buried the old MME and DirectX audio interfaces, and removed all the remnants of KStream (if any still exist). And most importantly told the mfgs to write their drivers properly, as ASIO has shown that pretty much all of the current devices can handle low latency audio just fine. The Steinberg Generic ASIO driver and ASIO4All have proven that.

But were they to do that they would instantly invalidate a lot of hardware and software that will never be updated. And I don't know what they can do, perhaps told that with 10 all new devices have to be WASAPI capable while old interfaces still work. Or maybe they should've done this when Vista happened with the new display driver model, and force audio drivers to do the same.

WASAPI by itself is quite capable, it allows all of the fancy stuff like inter-app audio (via loopback interfaces) and stream redirection (to swap between audio devices on the fly), stream recording/tapping, stream FX, and of course individual mixing of sources. It's not quite CoreAudio but it's not far off. I don't think it allows aggregate devices, but there's no reason why it couldn't do it via an update.

But as it happens... it's all optional so we don't get all of the fancy features for the most part, and if you're writing software that uses audio but it's not about audio, like games, why bother?. I can use Audacity to record whatever's playing back but that's the extent of my WASAPI usage. I can use Bitwig with it for low latency audio, but as ASIO exists what's the point?

Maybe I'm all wrong with this though, for my small application coding usage I just tell Portaudio to grab me a ASIO device or if such doesn't exist, just fucking pick me something working, I don't care.

 

You too eh...

The one thing that I liked about them was the sampler, though interfacing with that could be a bit of a nightmare. I had a whopping 64mb RAM on the sampler which was enough to hold substantial soundsets (young guys are looking at 64mb and finding that hard to believe! )

The hardware MIDI timing was atrocious and barely useable - I always had to render one channel at a time or the jitter would be all over the place.

The worst thing was that it took them about two years after the hardware went on sale before the drivers and software even remotely functioned. It all felt a bit scammy and was what sank them as a company in the end as nobody trusted them after that. I wouldn't have bought another product from them for sure.

This is back in the day when if you didn't know your I/Os and IRQs you were going to fail big time doing audio with a PC. Those were the days eh.

You've Pete Brown at Microsoft to thank for that as he's been the man communicating directly with the audio community for a number of years now and pushing Microsoft to improve pro audio support.

 

that's the Apple way of updating

 

Sorry bro, I can't read that sh*t anymore.
It’s true that Microsoft, with WASAPI and ASIO, works within the limits of fragmented PC hardware, the statement overlooks that the x86 PC audio stack has barely evolved in decades. I mean that x86 architecture is f*cking 47 years old! And MS is still milking that dead cow!

Core Audio prove that a uniform, system-wide driver and aggregation model is achievable when the OS vendor enforces strict compliance across hardware. The claim that standardization in the PC space is “not a thing” is more a result of historical and political choices (driver freedom, OEM fragmentation) than of technical impossibility.

WASAPI was efficient but still sits on top of a legacy driver model (WDM-Audio, late-1990s design). This introduces unnecessary context switches, buffering layers, and inconsistencies in multichannel or aggregation scenarios. The notion that low latency is only achievable in exclusive mode or via ASIO is largely a side effect of these architectural leftovers. A modern, unified kernel-level audio framework with mandatory real-time scheduling for audio threads could deliver comparable or even better latency system-wide, without proprietary ASIO workarounds.

So the “everyone-should-be-rich” analogy doesn’t really hold: the problem isn’t an unattainable dream but rather the lack of a centrally enforced standard on a platform that has historically prioritized backward compatibility over progress.

 

They (Microsoft) said I need to buy a new computer to run Win 11. Fuck em'!

 

No you don´t, I´ve been installing W11 for relatives and work buddies on their old computers without TPM.
..And in Europe you get free updates for a year, if you have an MS account

 

Unfortunately, I think it will be many many years before all software apps that have audio capabilities will use window's new ASIO drivers. So I wouldn't expect to have low latency audio in games and voice/video chat apps anytime soon.

 

It doesn't overlook it, because that is a fictitious statement. x86 has nothing to do with the current audio stack.

 

It's a comparison to the not-progress auf MS.

 

I´ve dont some homework when i started seriously diggin into production, so i went all the way back as far as i could and the hw i had at the attic was windows95 ready, so i started with the every OS, installed it and tried messing with it to see what´s the deal, i had a bit of spare time.

Windows98, installed on the modern 4ghz cpu has absolutely instant response(midi wise), it is ridiculus, i could not achieve that snappy feel even with 3ms PCI interface on XP/w7/10. Dont miss the point, other than running midi hw it is unusable, but i could not believe we lost that direction..i bet folks who still compose on Ataris are hooked to that, it is really a shame we cant have that, and we move further and further from it. I played a guitar and it felt like an instrument, loading old Steinberg A1 and playing it was really falmiliar feel. Such a shame.

 

Probably because these days Windows is pretty insignificant compared to Microsoft's other products. Windows was just ~9% of Microsoft's revenue in 2024, and the world has become a lot more OS-agnostic too.

 

Like that ever worked.
Best we could do with midi was yanking it through an USB cable. But basically it's stuck in '82. Way too many parties involved to get somewhere.
on the other hand: Is there a need for Asio ' 25?
I lately had an usb interface that did 1, 5ms output latency. (seemed to be legit, but need to test it properly). That is sound traveling half a meter. Thats the wavelength of about 700hz.
I mean, any low pass introduces more shift than those 1.5ms.
So honest question: what needs to be fixed with asio?
(PS: that Windows thing is not gonna be the new asio, if gamers are lucky it's gonna be just as good)

 

I recently bought an internal PCI sound card for a used gaming PC: ASUS - Xonar PCI SoundCard for €38 because the Realtec chip on the motherboard had died. Now my young gamer has great sound, and for Christmas I'm also getting an "EDIFIER Studio R1280DB Active 2.0 Speaker System"! I hope he enjoys it; I can't comment on latency. I think PCI is a great, fast thing.

I used to have three PCI sound cards: ESI Maya 44, a beginner's card, E-MU 1212M PCIe (PCIe Digital Audio System), good quality, but the graphical interface is outdated, and finally the Infrasonic Quartet - a 4-channel PCI audio interface with a great AK4620A chip, low latency, and very good performance. Today I also have a USB-C Audient iD14.

 

While true, a big part of Microsoft's income is Windows' integration with things like Active Directory and Exchange and various Windows Server offerings to run these things on (can you even administer a MS SQL Server on a Linux box without resorting to RDP? I'm not sure). So a lot of Microsoft's corporate income is Windows indirectly. And if you're softlocked to MS anyway then it's easier to do Azure as well and so on.

Besides, 9% of 100 billion income ain't nothing to sneeze at, they definitely don't want to lose Windows desktop as it's a big part of their overall strategy.

 

It's simply an ASIO driver included with Windows for those with a USB interface that doesn't come with its own. It's more a gesture of convenience, it's not a replacement for the current Windows Audio system. The idea is that including this driver along with the MIDI system revamp will be step toward acknowledging the needs of audio production on Windows.