ASIO4ALL for Two Sound Devices

[David Ferris]

I'm currently using ASIO4ALL, v.1.8 with the included SoundMAX chips. This driver has worked like a charm, both for playback and for recording in Cubase SX/Halion.

Today I installed an ESI Juli@ soundcard, to use as my recording apps card. I learned from an ESI forum post that Juli@ has problems with ASIO. Yikes! The poster suggested using ASIO4ALL with the JUli@ card.

I bought the Juli@ because I sometimes want to have Cubase/Halion and Sibelius notation software open at the same time, and I need different audio devices to be able to do that.

Does anyone know how to if it's possible to use ASIO4ALL with both SoundMAX and Juli@?

[Michael Tippach]

Of course it is possible to have one audio app using ASIO4ALL on top of the Juli@ WDM driver and another one using ASIO4ALL on top of the SoundMax WDM driver running at the same time.

I would, however, expect a performance hit from this type of operation since it involves continious switching from one process to another and these kinds of context switches are rather expensive, CPU wise.

[David Ferris]

That's good news.

There won't be a problem with CPU load, because I use the same (piano) speakers for both apps---which I'm doing right now.

How do I tell ASIO4ALL to wrap around the Juli@ drivers, too?

[Michael Tippach]

If you use the same set of speakers for both, I assume you have a mixing desk connected to both the SoundMax and the Juli@ outputs?

This still would mean that you've got two audio processes running at the same time on your computer, making it necessary to constantly keep switching between these two audio processes in short time intervals.

Which doesn't mean that it cannot work mind you.

I have no idea about Sibelius, but certainly there is an audio configuration dialog from where you could open the ASIO4ALL control panel. Here you need to select the audio device you want to use with Sibelius and make some adjustments to the buffer size etc. if necessary.

In Cubase, under Devices/VST Multitrack, you do the same but select the other audio device. ASIO4ALL stores its settings per application, so changes you made under Cubase will not affect the settings made in Sibelius and vice versa.

[DavidH]

Michael,

I did not know that ASIO4ALL's settings were application-specific. Thanks so much for that info.