Audio Stream Input/Output

ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) is a low latency audio application programming interface designed by Steinberg (developers of software Cubase and VST technology) for high speed communications between audio hardware and software, such as the the interaction between MIDI Controllers and MIDI Sequencers needed by musicians and studio engineers. It can be used to access multiple sound I/O simultanously. After Steinberg was bought by a seperate company, they released the SDK (Developement Kit) to the public free of charge on their website. There have been several attempts made by 3rd party developers to write drivers in order to bring ASIO to all consumer grade soundcards (see asio4all). There has been a seperate plugin written for Foobar2000 allowing users with access to ASIO to use it for other purposes, mainly low-latency kernel streaming (see foo_input_asio).

External links

• ASIO SDK official Steinberg website of the SDK developement package
• asio4all website of the German 3rd party developement effort