Audio loopback for win10 drivers#
Audio loopback for win10 update#

Audio loopback for win10 update#

Who this post is for: anyone with a relatively recent Windows 10 machine that is has run Windows Update as of mid-2019, particularly people with laptops who donвЂ™t want to cart an external audio interface around with them in order to run a DAW with a MIDI controller attached. Bear in mind that some older programs donвЂ™t even support WASAPI at all. Standalone synth applications will be hit and miss for supporting the necessary settings. NOT ALL SOFTWARE ALLOWS THIS but most recent DAWs should. Your DAW/synth permits you to adjust the latency settings in WASAPI mode.The solution here only works if you want to make music and just do that for a while вЂ“ you canвЂ™t, for example, watch YouTube while composing on the same machine. You donвЂ™t open any other sound-using programs, like web browsers.You use exclusive mode in your DAW/synth with your sound device, which requires thatвЂ¦.Your computer is in high performance mode or equivalent and plugged in.On a lot of newer machines with an up-to-date Windows 10 version, you can get surprisingly good performance out of WASAPI drivers, which every on-board sound device should have. However, the general tricks here are applicable to any Windows 10 machine where the operating system version is up-to-date as of mid-2019. IвЂ™m going to using my Surface Pro 4 as a specific example for each step, both because the latency issues of the on-board audio for Surface series in music-making is very well documented (via sites like ) and because I love my Surface Pro 4 as a general-purpose device to take on the road. No amount of settings fiddling got me the performance I wanted from on-board chips on Windows machines, so I just resigned myself to dragging around an external audio box whenever I needed to make music on the go with a Windows laptop.

Audio loopback for win10 drivers#

Sometimes you can get away with up to 15ms, but by the time you hit 20ms or higher, youвЂ™ll likely hear the lag and it will be hard to play in time.ДЇor many years and prior versions of Windows, even Windows 10, I found that achieving acceptable audio latency with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or stand-alone synthesizer required ASIO drivers вЂ“ which exist for most external audio interfaces but not for most on-board sound chips. In order to play a MIDI controller through a virtual instrument and have it feel responsive, the total latency (delay) between key press and sound typically needs to be 10ms or less, which is to say below the threshold at which we can detect it with our ears.