AKIYAMA ASIO DRIVER. Instruction Manual

Transcription

1 AKIYAMA ASIO DRIVER Instruction Manual

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION... 1 INSTALLATION... 1 SETTING UP YOUR AUDIO SOFTWARE... 2 CONFIGURATION... 2 Device List... 2 ASIO Buffer Size... 3 TROUBLESHOOTING... 3 INTRODUCTION Welcome to Akiyama ASIO Driver va This manual enables you to make the most of your Akiyama ASIO Driver installation In order to achieve the best possible results with Akiyama ASIO Driver, it is recommended that your computer is configured accordingly: Before click Next read the information at welcome window. While installing the drivers we recommend you close all other applications running in your computer. This will enable important file upgrades without the need to reboot the computer. Select Next to start the installation. Following license agreement window will appear. - Set the power scheme to Always On (XP) or High Performance (Vista & 7) in order to turn off Processor P-State switching! Advanced: Modify an existing power scheme so as to not switch CPU speed, because other power settings are not that critical. - Turn off system sounds. While e.g. the Windows logon sound certainly will not be a problem, sound effects in response to button clicks, notifications etc. will mean that for the time they play, Akiyama ASIO Driver may be unable to initialize the audio device. For updates, help and further information, please visit: - Akiyama Web site INSTALLATION Double click the icon of the file: Akiyama_ASIO_Driver_Setup.exe. Installation will start at once. Firstly, it will appear the welcome window as seen below. Select the accept box and press Next. Select the folder where the driver will reside, by defect it will be C:\Program Files\Akiyama ASIO Driver\ To select another folder click Browse and search for the desired folder. Following select Install. 1

3 In Traktor you should select Settings and in Virtual DJ select ASIO config to launch the control panel (green rectangle). Sometimes, the audio software indeed would not provide an ASIO control panel option. This is the case for e.g. some ASIO output plugins in media player software. For configuring Akiyama ASIO Driver with these applications anyway, you can launch the control panel by clicking on the Akiyama ASIO Driver status icon in the System Tray area. The tray icon will become visible whenever an application initializes the Akiyama ASIO Driver. If there is no tray icon, your audio application is not currently using the Akiyama ASIO Driver. Finally press Finish to exit install wizard. SETTING UP YOUR AUDIO SOFTWARE In order to make use of Akiyama ASIO Driver, you need to configure your audio software accordingly. How you would do this depends on your particular software application. Generally, you would always enter to the audio configuration menu and select ASIO -> AKIYAMA ASIO. For example: when using Traktor you have to go to Audio Setup in Preferences and select AKIYAMA ASIO from the list of Audio Devices (blue rectangle). If you are using Virtual DJ you must open the settings window and select Sound Setup. Afterwards, it is necessary to select ASIO driver as sound card and select AKIYAMA ASIO from the list (blue rectangle). The first three icons reflect the state of the driver according to the ASIO spec, i.e. "running", "prepared", "loaded/stopped". The exclamation mark will flash briefly if the driver encountered an internal overload condition resulting in a restart of the audio engine. Note: When it is possible to access the ASIO control panel from within the audio application, you should use that option instead of clicking the tray icon! Changes made in the control sometimes may not have an effect until you restart the audio application. Once you made it into the Akiyama ASIO Driver control panel (one way or the other) you can now proceed with configuration. CONFIGURATION Device List There now should be a button to launch the ASIO control panel. How this button is labelled depends on your particular software. Once you press this button, the Akiyama ASIO control panel should appear. Please consult the manual of your audio software for further assistance, if necessary. This is the list of WDM audio devices found in your system. The device list is expandable. By expanding the device list, you can fully explore the WDM audio architecture of your system. The device list contains Devices and Device Interfaces. 2

4 Activate the device you want to use by clicking on the button next to the device name. Using the button next to each device interface, you can now selectively enable/disable each particular interface of the device. This way, you can also create multi-device-setups. In the picture above, both sound cards would be enabled while the interfaces HD Audio Mixed capture and HD Audio SPDIF out would not be enabled. The names of the channels of a device may change depending on the configuration of the Akiyama ASIO Driver. In the picture above if ARES SC4 was the only selected device, outputs from 1 to 4 of ASIO would correspond to the physical outputs from 1 to 4 of the device. However, if we had the ASIO driver configured like in the picture above, outputs from 1 to 8 of ASIO would correspond to High Definition Audio Device while the names of the four outputs of ARES SC4 would be 9, 10, 11 and 12 in ASIO. In the picture below it is shown how it must be configured Virtual DJ using the ASIO configuration showed in the picture above. Using this configuration deck 1 and deck 2 would be routed to the channel 1 and of the ARES SC4 sound card and headphones would be routed to the headphones output of your computer. Inactive The device should be available for use in this session but has not been started yet Unavailable The device is in use elsewhere, such as by another audio application or by the MS GS Software Wavetable Synth. Beyond Logic You get this if the device for some unknown reason refuses to start and/or displays erratic behavior of any kind. Sometimes, closing and reopening the control panel may cure the situation, as may unplug and re-inserting of USB devices. Sometimes, this can also mean the same as Unavailable, whenever the device does not report its current availability or the lack thereof back to Akiyama ASIO Driver. Note: If the device list is empty, this means that you do not have a single WDM audio device in your system. Please check with your audio hardware manufacturer for a WDM driver! Highlight the device that you want to make changes to. Note: All parameter changes always only apply to the currently highlighted device! ASIO Buffer Size Use the slider to adjust the ASIO buffer size for the device currently highlighted. Smaller buffer size means lower latency. Once you hear crackles or audio becomes distorted, you need to increase the buffer size. ASIO buffer size directly relates to audio latency. Thus, you want to get a rather small value here. TROUBLESHOOTING Multi-device-setups require that all the devices involved are running from the same clock source. Fortunately, most USB devices will automatically synchronize themselves for as long as the host controllers they are connected to have a common clock source, which is trivially true for the USB host controllers embedded in the south bridge on any mainboard. Note: If devices are not accurately synced, their audio streams are likely to drift apart over time! If you do not need audio inputs, you best disable them all, which normally will provide you with a better stability at very small ASIO buffer sizes, or allow smaller buffer sizes in the first place. You should also disable all audio outputs you do not really need. To disable channels expand the items in the WDM device list and disable everything you do not want to use in this setup. The current state of each device is shown as a small icon on its associated button. It can be either of these: Active The device has been successfully started by the audio engine. If you change the device setup in the Akiyama ASIO Driver 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: - Akiyama ASIO Driver 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 Akiyama ASIO Driver as an underprivileged user. In the latter case, please log on as Administrator and install Akiyama ASIO Driver again. Once successfully installed, Akiyama ASIO Driver 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. 3

5 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 Akiyama ASIO Driver, the previous driver will not release the audio device in time. If the device is an USB/PCMCIA/FireWire device, close the Akiyama ASIO Driver control panel, unplug the device, plug it in again and re-open the Akiyama ASIO Driver control panel. - Cannot play sound from another application when Akiyama ASIO Driver is active This is by design. As close to the hardware as possible means that all the software mixing provided by Windows will be bypassed. Without any software mixing - and the associated latency and bit mangling - you are stuck with the hardware mixing capabilities of your audio device. Most of the time, there simply is no hardware mixing capabilities at all. - (Vista) the meters are moving, everything looks o.k. - But there is no sound Drivers for High Definition Audio devices have a habit of listing SPDIF outputs before the analog ones. As a consequence, the first two or more ASIO channels will be routed to SPDIF. You can change this by either disabling the SPDIF output in the Akiyama ASIO Driver control panel or correctly assigning ASIO channels in your audio application. - 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! Akiyama ASIO Driver stores settings per host application/per user. This makes it possible to have several instances of Akiyama ASIO Driver 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 to every user of a computer to have their own configuration. 4

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