MIDI and Audio

Audio Drivers

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QuickScore Elite can use three types of audio drivers, ASIO audio drivers, DirectSound audio drivers and Multimedia Audio drivers.

If an ASIO driver is available for your audio hardware, it will generally provide superior quality audio and lower latency (the time between when the analog signal is received by the soundcard and is made available to the recording program). This is especially important for recording.

ASIO drivers bypass the Windows sound system, allowing direct, high speed communication with audio hardware. This creates one drawback, which is that when they are in use, the regular Windows sound system will not play using the hardware accessed by the ASIO driver. Thus, when using an ASIO driver, the Windows Media player or the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synthesizer, for example, may not be able to play.

DirectSound drivers generally do not provide as low latency as ASIO drivers, but they integrate with the Windows sound system, and therefore do not impede other audio software, such as the Windows Media player, from playing. DirectSound playback is generally satisfactory, given acceptable audio hardware, although recording can be problematic.

Multimedia audio drivers are the drivers of last resort. They are generally worse than either ASIO or DirectSound drivers. QuickScore will only use Multimedia drivers if no other drivers are available.

QuickScore accesses the audio system in two separate ways - it uses high-level access to the Windows sound system for saving audio files when it uses the Save As command from the File menu - and uses ASIO, DirectSound or low-level Multimedia audio drivers for audio that passes through the Audio Mixer. These drivers are chosen in the Audio Setup dialog available from the Options menu.