Managing things are a bit more consistent across the variety of hardware out there since you rely more on the OS & your application's controls.
OS X has a much more transparent audio stack (Core Audio) with proper drivers and is integrated into the OS from the get go. Actually, I'd love to find out more about this aspect.) (Mind you, OS's do make various audio-oriented modules available for optional use of applications, so that if you are, say, designing an office productivity product that uses audio in some peripheral fashion you don't have to 'redesign the wheel' just to get audio into your prg - but it's my understanding that serious DAW publishers tend to design their own engines in large part. (You really want to avoid legacy MDM drivers.) Unfortunately, I'm not up to date with Vista/Win 7 audio issues.Īnd, of course, Altitude is correct, the device driver protocol is just that, a protocol for communication between the device and a given DAW's audio engine which handles various mixing and processing chores. If I remember the story correctly, the specialized driver format was designed in whole or in large part by Cakewalk who wanted higher performance audio drivers than the then-WDM standard. An alternative to ASIO drivers when using Sonar (and perhaps Reaper?) in Windows is to use WDM-KS kernel streaming drivers, if they're available for your device, which were specially designed to offer higher performance than the standard WDM drivers.
