[SOC] ASIO

[Willie Sippel]

Am Dienstag, 18. April 2006 11:56 schrieb Christian Gmeiner:
> What is ASIO?
>
> ASIO is a driver interface for pro-audio apps developed by Steinberg. It's
> somewhat similar to our beloved Jack sound server, but not as advanced.
>
> I thought about implementing ASIO for wine so we are one step neaer to a
> running Cubase. I have also some advanced audio hardware - hercules 16/12
> fw (need to check if there are some dirvers).
>
> At the moment I am a student of Computer Sciences in the 4 term and have
> done programming with c, c++ and java.
>
> Bugs, which get fixed:
> http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2161
>
> What do you think about this idea?
>
> Thanks,
> Christian

I like the idea - obviously, I reported the bug... ;-) 

Some more infos about ASIO: ASIO is a low-latency audio protocol. ASIO is not 
part of Windows, and was not developed by Microsoft, but by Steinberg Media 
Technologies. It comes with most soundcard drivers, though, and is a de-facto 
standard for pro-audio applications. Most (all?) pro-audio applications at 
least support ASIO, and many applications _only_ support ASIO these days (no 
DSound/ MME/ whatever at all). Those applications won't ever work on Wine 
without ASIO.

There are some problems, though. The ASIO SDK license is quite free, you can 
basically do what you want with it AFAIU, but you may not redistribute parts 
of the SDK. Steinberg intended to BSD-license all their SDKs a while ago, but 
that idea was canned after Yamaha bought Steinberg. Everyone may download it 
from the Steinberg website, though, and the binaries may be redistributed. So 
prebuilt Wine packages may come with ASIO support enabled. If anyone wants to 
build Wine from source and needs ASIO support, they need to get the SDK from 
Steinberg.

ASIO EULA and SDK:
http://www.steinberg.de/329+M54a708de802.html

ASIO description on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_stream_input_output

-- 
Willie Sippel

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