ASIO Support / Compatibility

Continuing the discussion from Drivers Windows:

In case of USB DACs WASAPI will do most of the time.
BTW: what kind of WASAPI are you using?
Plain WASAPI (push mode) or WASAPI event style (pull mode).
The latter works nice with most modern DACs.

Discrete soundcards in general don’t cope well with WASAPI. They simply don’t support automatic sample rate switching.
If the card supports ASIO, you don’t have this problem.
IMHO ASIO should be high on the list.

I would second this request to step up the ASIO compatibility in the priority list.

For those of us with devices that have an ASIO driver this would be the most elegant and bespoke solution. I’m somewhat surprised this wasn’t seen as a prerequisite.

Thanks.

Thank you for your input, we’re getting a lot of feedback about this and it’s clear that we need to re-think the priority of ASIO and DSD Native support. We’ll be having discussions internally.

This would be a hugely useful feature!

ASIO support is coming! We will update with timelines as soon as things are more firm.

Thanks for the feedback @crom!

1 Like

build 21 – it’s out now!

Hi @danny!

This is great news!
Of course I tried it immediately.

Here is what I found out:

If I try to enable a virtual ASIO-Device (Software: AcourateConvolver), an error message is shown:" Failed: Audio Device Not Found"
No possibility to chose a channel offset. That means, with an multichannel device e.g. RME HDSP9632 always channel 0+1 are used.

Regards
Matthias

If I try to enable a virtual ASIO-Device (Software: AcourateConvolver), an error message is shown:" Failed: Audio Device Not Found"

This means that we Roon to open the driver, and it failed.

Is it possible that something else on your system is using the driver at the same time?

No possibility to chose a channel offset. That means, with an multichannel device e.g. RME HDSP9632 always channel 0+1 are used.

Correct. We haven’t done multi-channel device support yet. It will always use 0+1 at the moment.

I had an issue today where there was no playback ASIO, I had to restart roon. I think it might be an issue with the Devialet being off and roon not recovering gracefully from that situation.

Will investigate further and confirm.

roon definately hangs and won’t play anything if you shut off the ASIO device or switch input while roon is running. Or at least with the Devialet it does. This didn’t happen with WASAPI.

I’ve gone back to WASAPI in the meantime.

Just a data point. I tried this with Roon Core connected to my MSB Analog DAC using ASIO. I can have music playing to the MSB, turn off my DAC, re start the DAC and all is well.

I can switch from the MSB (ASIO) to System Output on the same machine and playback to system output, I can than switch to MSB (ASIO) and playback to MSB.

Never had to re start ROON. FWIW.

When you switch input ( I assume you mean output from Roon) do you first pause the track playing? And when you say Roon hangs, does that mean you get no more response from Roon, and have to kill the process?

No, I mean inputs on my Devialet amp. When I’m done listening to music I switch from USB in to an analog in from my multi channel receiver for HT Bypass to my mains.

Roon is left running 24/7 without music playing. I then come back the next day turn my Devialet back and and put my Devialet back on USB input and try and play some music and the play button is unresponsive until I restart roon.

If I do the same with WASAPI it works fine. Just not ASIO.

It may be in my head by I find WASAPI duller sounding in comparison. Maybe a driver thing because they are both bit perfect.

OK, that is odd indeed. It should in theory be equivalent to turning my Analog DAC on/off/on while connected to the PC running Roon Core. Meaning no issue. Of course the ASIO drivers are different.

To be honest squeezelite didn’t like the Devialet ASIO driver in a similar fashion I remember. JRMC handled this scenary like a champ so I know it can be handled but without a Devialet I don’t think our good friends here at Roon Labs will be able to reproduce it.

Switching to WASAPI device and back to ASIO in roon seems to fix the issue as well. I can live with that for now.

@DrTone, we are working on getting our hands on Devialet gear so we can smooth out these experiences. It seems that their virtual drivers (on both windows and mac) both have some unique behaviors that want to be smoothed over.

@mike, can you help DrTone send us some logs? Maybe the problem will be apparent from looking at them. The new ASIO stuff is pretty chatty when things are going wrong.

Ok, I turned the Devialet off for about 30 minutes while I went downstairs to download a new HD album. When I came back up and turned it back on roon wouldn’t play through it anymore had to restart roon.

I thought it might be related to channel switching but it’s just powering it off while roon is running.

I thought it might be related to channel switching but it’s just powering it off while roon is running.

I can reproduce some similar sounding wackiness by powering off a USB DAC while Roon has the driver open. Hopefully if I get that running smoothly, it will help your issues with Devialet.

Not 100% sure if this will get in for next week’s release or not (running out of days), but I think we have a potential path forward here.

Thanks for the update. Let me know if you need any logs or anything else from me.