Yah, I figured as much...wanted to (hopefully) hear the semi-official word from Sony about the issue.

ST Audio has a long history of problems with drivers, although at one point they had some good stuff on Win95/98.

I guess I'm just wishing...I could REALLY use another eight inputs, and the card's just sitting there on the shelf...

Their responses sometimes seem a little disconnected from reality...at least it seems that way to me.

thats weird, when ST was Hoontech, the guys always had their drivers out pretty quick. A lot of guys running midiman 1010's would run the hoontech drivers for their mididmans, as they were always out months sooner. It sometimes feels like a lot of soundcard companies were using the same guy to write the drivers

While I understand what you want, there are too few cards that actually support n-channel Wave i/o in a conistent way. The emulated Wave i/o layered on top of WDM drivers makes the problem inconsistent.

The Wave driver model has always permits n-channel streaming to be exposed by a driver. The problem is that there is no way to discover this from the application side. With Wave emulation on native WDM drivers, even a simple stereo driver will say "sure, I can do that" where in reality it cannot.

This approach has nothing to do with WDM, but how the vendor choosed to expose their ports. The defacto standard is to expose sets of stereo pairs. In reality, that is the worse way to do it as it causes the vendor to jump through all kinds of hoops to sync the exposed stereo pairs. Many vendors expose many different models to support existing hardware. MOTU, Echo, MAudio to name a few, all support the different driver models so that the user can choose what works best for them given their host applications.

Which vendors are not exposing stereo pairs beside the one you mention?

When WDM was just a dream, we actually begged vendors to expose their n-channel cards as single ports. This was possible because Windows would not get in the way an 'emulate' n channels on hardware that didn't support it. This was because Wave drivers were native and not emulated.

Wave is considered legacy by Microsoft and most vendors. We support it for backward compatability reasons. WDM Kernel streaming has many problems that make it unattractive. We chose ASIO over this because of these limitations. While ASIO is far from perfect, it is a well supported standard that provides the majority of users the solution they need.


Q: Why not use the ASIO drivers for the Hoontech?

However, it is something that I will bring up and consider support for in a future release.

Peter

> Which vendors are not exposing stereo pairs beside the one you mention?

I don't know...ST Audio/Egosys/ESI seems to think it's EVERYBODY, but I can't say that I've ever seen it elsewhere. If it exposes Wave drivers, they've always been available as stereo pairs as you describe, or as BOTH stereo pairs and multi-port devices (which is what my Deltas do).

> Q: Why not use the ASIO drivers for the Hoontech?

Because then I can't use the Deltas...you can only use one ASIO driver at a time, yes? If I can use ASIO with two different kinds of card at the same time, then problem is solved, but I really don't think you can do that, can you?

Scott

Here's the response I got on the ST Audio support forum...

"The card has whats called interleaved wdm drivers and most cards being released now only have interleaved drivers as this is the correct way to write a wdm driver. Vegas needs to be updated to support the uise of interleaved drivers, please contact the support for vegas or use the older drivers."

Sigh...

So, now about these ASIO drivers...

Scott

what useable apps use interleaved drivers?