External ASIO soundcard problem

[JSD]

Hi,

I recently installed parallels (v 1848) on my macbook. The installation of WinXP was no problem, everything worked fine - with one exception: my external soundcard, a terratec phase 26 USB. I am totally unable to install the delivered drivers for this card - the system tells me it is not able to start the device. This is necessary, because I want to use the sound device in ASIO mode. In the normal mode, it works ok, meaning I can playback wave and mp3 files (via the soundcard emulation of parallels or somewhat).
If I try to run it via Bootcamp, everything works perfect.

What I tried to solve the prob:

- different USB ports
- disable / enable sound in the VM settings
- Null device

... there was absolutely no chance to install that damn drivers I need. Does anybody of you guys have an idea how to do it?

 

[kpop]

It is unlikely that you will get a low-latency audio driver (such as ASIO) to work decently. Even using the internal sound card with the low-overhead asio4all driver results in cracks and pops even with highest latency settings (>1000 ms). USB is worse, everything that requires a lot of USB bandwidth (such as audio) will result in problems.

So as of now, using win DAWs (digital audio workstation) is out. It'd be very cool to midi sync OS X to XP via TCP (e.g. with MidiOverLAN), one could use nice win VSTi's from within OS X (e.g. Logic running EnergyXT). Works currently extremely well between a Mac and a PC, but imagine doing this within one machine. Should technically be doable, I guess. Maybe ver 3?

 

[celticdale]

It is unlikely that you will get a low-latency audio driver (such as ASIO) to work decently. Even using the internal sound card with the low-overhead asio4all driver results in cracks and pops even with highest latency settings (>1000 ms). USB is worse, everything that requires a lot of USB bandwidth (such as audio) will result in problems.

So as of now, using win DAWs (digital audio workstation) is out. It'd be very cool to midi sync OS X to XP via TCP (e.g. with MidiOverLAN), one could use nice win VSTi's from within OS X (e.g. Logic running EnergyXT). Works currently extremely well between a Mac and a PC, but imagine doing this within one machine. Should technically be doable, I guess. Maybe ver 3?

I'm using ASIO4ALL within W2K and it works perfectly. I even set the buffer down to 256 and get very good performance. I tried MIDIOverLan and found that ipMIDI was faster and more reliable. I use both FLStudio 5.02 and eXT as hosts in W2K. By using Wormhole, I can even send audio to my Mac host. There are several reasons I do this:

1. Reaktor is not a Universal Binary, yet.

2. There's a lot of good Windows VSTi's that don't exist in the Mac world.

3. By setting up my Windows DAW as a "effects rack", I can use it like outboard gear with full delay compensation handled by my host.

4. ipMIDI allows me play my USB keyboard thru my Mac and into the Windows DAW. I get about 15ms latency (fully loaded DAW) which isn't too bad for playing pads (Atmosphere, STS-21, Protoplasm Pro) and tweaking controls in Reaktor. With a single VST or Reaktor in standalone mode, latency is around 10ms or less.

Though you can sync MIDI via the LAN, it's not sample accurate. I usually record loops and send them down to my Mac DAW for editing.

Right now, this is the most stable system I've EVER run. FL Studio used to crash on me constantly on a PC but on my Mac, it's perfect. NEVER crashed, yet! It's actually spooky.

The only thing I hate about Parallels is how it handles USB MIDI. It doesn't work at all. I've tried six different manufacturers MIDI controllers and none of them work. Coreaudio grabs it and won't let it go. VM Fusion has a clever way of handling it; it slays the MIDI device and allows Windows to take over. That's VERY cool. I've been trying to figure out the command in a terminal window but haven't been successful, yet.

Once the UB versions of all my software come out, I'll probaby stop using Parallels. In the meantime, I'm having a blast playing in "both worlds".

What I'd love to see is Parallels come up with their own ASIO driver that talks directly to Coreaudio and a USB solution that works like VMWare. Music guys would love it.

Cheers.

-Dale

Edit: I just wanted to add that the ASIO4ALL driver is working with the emulated soundcard within W2K and NOT the Presonus. The sound does go out the Presonus (Firewire) device, though. It's pretty spooky but it works great. Win2K doesn't know that the Firewire device is there.

 

[alkalifly]

What I'd love to see is Parallels come up with their own ASIO driver that talks directly to Coreaudio and a USB solution that works like VMWare. Music guys would love it.

Wow, a Parallels ASIO driver would be SO cool, but it would probably need to be written specifically for each guest OS (like Parallels tools) so I imagine this is more of a long term feature request.

Parallels recent Shared Networking proves they are committed to overcoming the shortcomings of built in limitations (in the case of Shared Networking, with the NAT server), and I would imagine that if they made some sort of no-latency audio driver that plays nice with coreaudio, they could make it an optional add-on to the Parallels base application, and us audio folks would gladly cough up an additional $30-$50 for the feature (so long as it really works).