User Guide

Troubleshooting
Since ASIO4ALL presents itself to the audio software as a single ASIO driver, but due to its various
configuration options, can act like a chameleon, there are numerous things that can go wrong without
ASIO4ALL being at fault. Most notably, if you change the device setup in the ASIO4ALL control panel, the
number of available input and output channels is likely to change, as well as the names of the channels that
are seen by the host application. Therefore, it is always advisable to restart your audio host application after
any change in the audio device setup whenever you find that the particular application does not appear to be
able to handle these kinds of changes on the fly.
More potential problems and possible solutions:
• ASIO4ALL v2 not visible in host audio configuration menu
There are two possible reasons for this: Either your audio application does not support ASIO or you
installed ASIO4ALL v2 as an underprivileged user. In the latter case, please log on as Administrator and
install ASIO4ALL v2 again. Once successfully installed, ASIO4ALL v2 should not require Administrator
privileges anymore in order to run.
• Audio device flagged as “Unavailable” or “Beyond Logic” even though it is not in use elsewhere
You want to make sure the “MS GS Software Wavetable Synth” or anything by a similar name is not
enabled anywhere in you MIDI setup. The ASIO4ALL Web Site has further information on that.
If any such “Software Wavetable Synth” (sometimes in disguise as “...DLS Synth...”) can be ruled out as
the cause, try to restart the audio host application. Sometimes, when switching from another driver to
ASIO4ALL v2, the previous driver will not release the audio device in time.
If the device is an USB/PCMCIA/FireWire device, close the ASIO4ALL control panel, unplug the
device, plug it in again and re-open the ASIO4ALL control panel.
• Changes made in the control panel do not propagate between different audio applications
...Neither do they propagate between different users! This is not a bug, it's a feature! ASIO4ALL v2
stores settings per host application/per user! This makes it possible to have several instances of
ASIO4ALL run at the same time for as long as they do not try to use the same piece of audio hardware
exclusively. This further allows having ASIO4ALL run in educational/computer lab type environments
without “user666” being able to f**** things up for any user on the same machine, with the exception of
“user666” him/her/itself.
• The latencies displayed in e.g. Cubase SX 3 do not match the values that would result from the
ASIO buffer size.
ASIO4ALL supports the latency compensation features of ASIO hosts that perform latency
compensation. This support is still a bit under development and will be improved as time passes. The
values reported here are not just the latencies ASIO4LL adds to the audio stream, but rather the represent
the whole shebang as far as driver/OS/hardware inherent latencies. If the guess was correct, that is...
Earlier Versions of ASIO4ALL did not make this attempt at guessing, so you may obtain a smaller
latency display with v1.x and other WDM->ASIO wrappers. The true (i.e. Perceived) latencies are at
least as good as with earlier versions and on top of that, they do not change anymore when CPU
utilization goes up!