ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. This is Gearwire.Com series of educational screencasts on the REAPER digital audio workstation from Cockos Corporation. Right now we’re going to take a look at REAPER’s support for the ASIO driver set. Now ASIO is a driver specification that provides lowered latency for audio applications. Latency is, I’ll make a, I’ll make a spe -- a simple definition. Latency is the delay in time it takes from audio to get from one spot to another. In the case of a digital audio workstation, latency, at the very minimum, is the time it takes to get from the hard drive out to the speakers.

Now, the nice thing about latency handling in REAPER is that exactly what you are experiencing at any given time when you are running the program is shown very clearly right in the main screen. Up here in the upper right, you see that, well you see that we’re running a 4416 with two channels and at 1024 samples. Excuse me two channels. But we, these next values correspond to the latency that is to say that we’ve got up to 169 milliseconds of latency as this audio comes pouring off of the hard drive and gets through the computer and into the analog domain, that is to say to the speakers.

Now one of the things that we can do to fix this or to change it is we can use different drivers that are engineered for better latency or quicker performance. And one of the really cool things about REAPER is the button to begin this process is located right at the place where you notice your settings in the first place. You notice your latency reading in the first place. Click right here and oops that’s right, we going to have to stop playback. So let’s stop playback.

I’ll go ahead and click that button and what’s happening is it zooms right into the menu that you would normally open by clicking Options and then, by clicking Options and Preferences under this menu. But it goes right to the audio device settings so that’s some real intelligent, contextual menu-ing here going on. And we’re pointing right at the choice boxes, or at the pick lists rather that we would use to select the different driver. Right now, we are experiencing kind of a high latency because we’re using the WAV out drivers as a native, Microsoft driver for this sort of fairly modest PC that we’re looking and running REAPER on right now. We can pick ASIO right now because I did install ASIO4ALL. ASIO4ALL is a free set of drivers that provide ASIO throughput for any kind of a Windows hardware and you can get that by Googling for ASIO4ALL. That’s A-S-I-O, the number four and then the word ALL. But, anyway let’s select ASIO and we see that we got ASIO4ALL version 2 as the driver and we have inputs enabled and the driver sees the audio inputs that are present. Conexant AMC audio is integrated audio. It is a, it’s not a separate soundcard or I/O. It’s not a PCI or a USB interface. It is integrated right on the motherboard of this computer. And so the input and the output channels are set up right there. If you need to get to the ASIO configuration directly, you simply click the ASIO Configuration button and there’s ASIO4ALL screen that comes right up. And of course you are able to change your buffer size. And you can also click Advanced and get into latency compensation. This is nice for when you have situations where you have plugins that are introducing lots of latency that you would like to, you would like to compensate for. But what we’re going to do here is we’re simply going to select ASIO as its basic, at its basic setting and OK. And then we take a look up here and we see that our millisecond count has plummeted. We are now down to 12 milliseconds of latency. And when we hit Start, we’ve got audio cooking right along with no problems. Just running a lot more efficiently and then what we hear is happening to the speakers a lot closer in time to the time that the audio is being pulled off the hard drive.

So that is REAPER’s setup under ASIO. Thanks for watching. This is Gearwire.Com. Watch for more videos in the future.