Lately I’ve encountered same question over and over, about sharing Bitwig’s audio via apps like Zoom, and the problem being that they use ASIO even when there’s no need for it.
It seems like not many people even know, that WASAPI driver works just fine on Windows, if you don’t need to use inputs or extra outputs for your session, and ASIO wrappers just bridge ASIO to WASAPI anyway.
And in case of needing to use inputs or extra outputs, or taking audio from specific apps, there’s native support for JACK, and then there are more specific ASIO wrappers like VB-Audio Voice Meter.
Ableton and many other DAWs are the cause of this nonsense, as not all of them support modern WASAPI driver model for unknown reasons.
One of the reasons I switched from Ableton to Bitwig (2017) was for WASAPI support.
I wish Bitwig also supported WASAPI In (like Reaper does). But WASAPI Out is at least half-helpful.
One of my 2 computers is Windows arm64 and I understand native ASIO is coming to that platform this summer. That’ll be interesting!
Anyway, good point – WASAPI works well. It doesn’t equal an external ASIO interface, but for situations when you don’t want/need the external interface, it’s the best choice for Windows.
@x.iso Thanks for this post. I haven’t even looked at the options since I switched back to Bitwig this year This is great news for my laptop that I use when travelling. I was using FlexASIO, now I can switch to native WASAPI.
Do you know what’s the deal with external interfaces? So if an external interface provides an ASIO interface, would it be better to use that as always? For ASIO I have 11.2 ms latency with 512 samples and with WASAPI I have 10ms latency with 441 samples.
proper external audio interfaces can actually make use of ASIO drivers not as wrappers, but direct way of communicating with device, thus allowing lowest possible latency for real-time critical applications. but when audio interface does not have native ASIO driver, all you get is a wrapper substitute that can in some cases add needless overhead, if you could just use WASAPI to begin with.
as far as I understand Bitwig’s wasapi implementation excludes duplex mode, which is why it should give honest 10ms of latency at given samplerate. when you start adding inputs, it adds to roundtrip latency. and when you use Exclusive mode, it can get you lower latency, at expense of hogging audio interface for itself (you won’t hear audio from other apps), and also higher DSP load, as CPU would have less time to process the buffer.
This is great news for my laptop that I use when travelling. I was using FlexASIO, now I can switch to native WASAPI.