Sound Designers

MME

In the beginning there was MME, but it was without standards for high-performance and therefore void for any real professional use, though many did because it was a Microsoft standard and therefore supposedly easy to code for.

Any windows audio application will probably support these by default, as they are a basic part of windows and if the application doesn't support them they will surely perish. So, if you have no other choice, you can almost guarantee that any application will use it.

WDM

WDM is the new Microsoft standard for multimedia drivers on Windows platforms. It started with Windows ME and continues through Windows 2000 and XP. There are now patches to make WDM work on Windows 98 Second Edition, but be warned, it WILL NOT WORK on the 98 original release. These drivers are much higher-performance than the original MME drivers they still don't quite match the performance of the next driver mentioned, the ASIO.

For a reason unbeknownst to me, application developers have been slow to adopt this, I don't understand why, and the ones that do seem to use differently. I had one card, the Philips Acoustic Edge, that I used for surround sound playback, which Cakewalk actually recognized as 6 stereo pairs of outs for the full 5.1 output, but other apps I have that supposedly support WDM still only saw it as one stereo output pair...so ultimately I don't know what to make of this type.

To use it to it's fullest possibilities you do need to make sure your sound card and applications support WDM if you wish to use it. If you are on a WIndows ME or newer (or a patched 98 SE) the OS itself will support it.

ASIO

ASIO drivers were developed for high-performance and low-latency, perfect for professional studio use. This however is not always an option, as few cards and applications support ASIO. ASIO is not a default part of Windows, it was created by a third party manufacturer, and therefore, in order to use it you must make sure of two things, first that your sound card actually has ASIO drivers as part of it's driver bundle, secondly, you need to make sure that the applications you use support ASIO as well.

All of Steinberg's application support ASIO (I think they played a large role in creating ASIO, but I am not sure), but Cakewalk, for example, does not support ASIO, so you would have to use the WDM or MME drivers for your card.

In my personal experience, ASIO seems to be the best performing device driver I have used, but it is also the least supported by cards and applications, however, that number is growing, more and more cards are starting to include ASIO drivers as part of their package.