Regarding ODeus ASIO Link Pro, I read that the developper died and his nephew has got the source code now and he is wondering what he could do with that… I don’t know if the situation evolved… Perhaps he could decide to propose it for GP5 
What he did was remove the licensing, and release the latest version as freeware. Good kid, that!
I used ASIO Link Pro for several months. Works very well. As I mentioned above, kind of difficult to figure out the interface. I created a thread about it here last September.
For Windows users that need something like this, it does what it does better than any of the alternatives that I’ve found.
However, in the context that djh created this thread, ASIO Link is not something I’d recommend him suggesting in a GP blog. It’s completely unsupported, it’s not particularly intuitive, and in my several months of use on two different computers it was not “set it and forget it.” It would stop working on me about once a week, leading to “I’m getting no sound and I don’t know why.” Once I figured out what was happening it’s easy enough to get it restarted. It’s just a bit of a pain. Enough of a pain that I stopped using it.
Regarding “what he did was remove the licensing…” Last I saw it was still being distributed as an executable installer, with a separate “patch” that modifies the dll’s to override the authorization check.
Thank you for the link to the post that I forgot and for this clarification.
Seems like this stuff cannot be recommended for any live performance where stability is critical.
Funny you say that, because its the ONLY product of all being discussed here that has consistently worked for me the way it should without crashes, and with zero latency. I’ve tried them all for my live rig, and I have ended up with ASIO Link Pro.
I understand why one might not want to recommend it on an official blog post, but to me its akin to the ‘insider secret menu’ at a fine dining establishment. The food isn’t on the regular menu, but its the best food they serve nevertheless.
Food for thought (pun intended!)
I was just responding to @Vindes comment -
It would stop working on me about once a week, leading to “I’m getting no sound and I don’t know why.
I understand. There are particular order-of-operation type procedures when using ASIO Link Pro for multi-client ASIO that, if not followed correctly, can lead to a result you weren’t looking for. (One app using ASIO becomes the ‘host’ client, and all other apps using ASIO then feed into it–so, opening the wrong one first means you wont get sound where you expect it).
It’s an old interface, and definitely takes some getting used to. I sure am glad that it works the way it does, though.
Just to be clear, I think it’s a great piece of software. But it’s unsupported, poorly documented, difficult to figure out, and not the kind of thing you just install and forget about.
I figured out what was leading to my “the sound has stopped” problems. It would sometimes happen after the computer went to sleep and woke back up, and sometimes happen when a piece of software tried to change ASIO settings upon starting. One thing not described here is that ASIO Link actually runs as two separate programs, accessible through two different interfaces. Either one of them can get messed up, and either way you have to exit the second one, restart the first, then restart the second. And when I restarted the second sometimes it would forget my routings.
If I were going to bring my laptop and Focusrite interface to a buddy’s house so a few of us could jam in the basement, I’d be fine using ASIO Link. If I were going to get up on stage at a gig people were paying to attend, I wouldn’t.
I fully advocate ASIO Link for people that don’t mind tinkering and experimenting. I just wouldn’t reference it in a blog if I were dhj marketing GP. (That being said, I believe the blog still refers to Virtual Audio Cable, which as far as I know just flat out won’t work for this application, but I haven’t tried it.)
So basically there is no reliable “virtual audio interface” on Windows?
If I followed well, voicemeeter could be a valuable solution…
I believe Voicemeeter Banana might be, but I haven’t used it and it’s a full mixer and interface aggregator from what I understand.
So in your blog example, GP would take ASIO in and out from Banana, and the DAW would also take audio in/out from Banana. Inside of the Banana mixer you would do the routing. Same thing for ASIO Link, except it’s graphically set up very differently.
I’m not aware of anything that’s just a simple working virtual audio cable that you can run between apps, and I looked around a lot. I think the Focusrite Control software has built in software loopback, but given that the Scarlett series drivers don’t do multiclient I never tried it.
Reaper had a thing called ReaRoute, which I think was related to or derived from a Reason thing, but I never had any luck getting that to work.
I’m also aware of a thing called Synchronous Audio Router that I’ve never tried but looks like it’s a wrapper to put around an existing audio interface driver and then you can add virtual channels and rename channels.
I read this nearly 2 year old thread with great interest and realized I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my own development using SAR.
In early 2019 I sequestered myself for some bizarre reasons and spent much of about 6 weeks perfecting a setup for live streaming that did all kinds of magic things for a foldback (no headphones) type live streaming setup that rode monitor gains based on mic gating to prevent feedback and all kinds of wacky things.
I based the whole works on using SAR’s “out of box” configuration for REAPER (via ASIO4ALL) and then proceeded to live stream using it for several hundred hours on twitch. Hi I’m Kevin and I‘ce to streamed for years on twitch. (“Hi Kevin”)
Now that I’ve found GP … and also had absolutely zero issues that came from SAR while running fairly demanding software including OBS encoding, and generally abusing the whole rig otherwise, and just got my grubby mitts on a new Scarlett Solo gen3 yesterday afternoon… I’m clearly going to have to revisit SAR.
1 Like
I’m thinking of giving Voicemeeter a try with GP.
In fact, I’ve used Voicemeeter Banana on my personal (non-GP) computer for a few years now and it works extremely well. I’ve been nervous to try it on my gigging laptop just in case there are any glitches that mess with my ability to perform music, but at this point I’m thinking it may be the way to go.
My main motivations for wanting to use Voicemeteer are
- I change physical audio interfaces frequently (I use an evo8 at my gigs, and I use the built-in headphone jack when I’m working on my GP rig at home) and this makes GP unhappy; if I can just let GP use Voicemeeter all the time, then I won’t have to bother GP with the details of which physical interface I’m using.
- I’d like to be able to record more channels than my physical interface provides, and I think that Voicemeeter Potato will solve this problem: it allows using 5 physical stereo inputs (allowing me to use more than one physical audio interface at once, which Windows ordinarily doesn’t allow) plus 3 virtual 8-channel inputs (which will show up in GP as outputs), plus 5 physical 8-channel outputs (of which I think I’d only need one) and 3 virtual stereo outputs (which would show up in GP as inputs; I would use one for my vocal mic, one for the monitor send from the house, and one for a pair of room mics for recording). I think I’m getting this right. It’s quite confusing.
Voicemeeter also has MIDI support, so conceivably I could control it from GP widgets without having to actually open the Voicemeeter interface during a gig. I haven’t given much thought to what purpose that might serve but it strikes me as potentially useful.
1 Like
And what about the latency?
When I’ve tried playing my MIDI keyboard through it I didn’t notice any audible latency. I’m not sure how to measure it quantitatively?
-
I’ve tried voicemeeter banana (one of the siblings in the voicemeeter family), but I was rather disappointed by the latency.
-
It is possible with voicemeeter to send several inputs to GP, but I did not success into sending multiple outputs from GP to voicemeeter.
-
You should be able to bundle inputs from different sources with voicemeeter, but the samplerate might be a problem. You will have to be lucky in my experience.
I’m not completely done with voicemeeter, but this far I’m not convinced. Might someone succeed, then I am really interestef to have a picture of the config.
With FlexAsio I have better results. And I also tried Jack2. The last one does really work, but there is a steep learning curve. With several configs, maybe it solves the problem of switching interfaces.
Just in case: I tried on Windows
I also tried different solutions and the only one which really worked was ASIO LINK PRO…
there are a few threads about this in the forums.
(Also on Windows)
That’s why it ended up being in “honorable mentions” → [blog] How to use a single-client ASIO driver with multiple applications on Windows
ASIO Link Pro ended up in the article because it is really very well developed (zero latency). Unfortunately - abandonware.
1 Like