11.5

General settings 471
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ASIO
However, if your sound card model uses ASIO drivers, you have some distinct
advantages over MME:
MAGIX LoLa is included, a universal ASIO driver which can be applied by many
sound cards which do not have ASIO drivers.
 Lower latency of the driver system. This results in considerably lower response
times for real-time editing. This enables software monitoring of the inputs (and
VST instruments). The CPU load of the system drops, more high-quality
effects are possible without intermediate bouncing operations.
 Driver-side synchronization between recording and playback is available. This
ensures that overdub recordings are 100 % stable regarding timing. This also
allows for mechanisms for compensating latency for effects permitting
software FX monitoring.
 ASIO also offers a general method for treating multi-channel audio. All
bit-resolution and multi-channel problems which may appear with WDM
drivers under Win2K/XP are avoided from the outset.
 Advanced hardware monitoring options are possible due to the use of ASIO
direct monitoring (flexible routing including pan & volume, regardless of sound
card).
ASIO setup
ASIO drivers: The drivers of each ASIO device currently or previously available
in the system are listed here. "Settings" opens the settings dialog of the sound
card driver. Please refer to the sound card manual for more information.
Buffer settings
Play/Record buffer: Specifies the buffer sizes for playback or recording of
audio data.
In principle, the larger the buffer, the safer playback will operate on slower
systems or at full load. The number of simultaneously playable tracks
increases. However, this reduces the reaction time of the PC, which can
particularly disturb processing of real-time effects. We therefore recommend
searching for an optimum compromise for your system.
When recording and playing simultaneously (record while play), the record and
play buffer have to be the same size.