The #1 Most Underrated Feature of an Audio Interface

Choosing an audio interface? Learn how drivers impact performance, latency, and sound quality in this video.

Thanks to @RMEAudio for making this video possible and supporting Audio University.

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00:00 Intro
00:42 What Is A Driver?03:53 How Audio Drivers Work
06:50 Not All Audio Drivers Are Equal
07:51 Types of Drivers
10:52 Important Factors
12:22 NEXT VIDEO - Get More From Your Audio Interface with These Tips
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#AudioUniversity

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[OutiLee]

We are grateful to RME for their driver updates on elder devices. Our RME Multiface has been running perfectly fine for almost 25 years.

[michaelgrabert]

Your suggestion for finding drivers may lead users to sites that provide drivers with malicious payloads added to the driver. Only get drivers from the manufactures site

[vladv]

This was the most informative RME commercial I've seen.

[polarisproject]

I own a MOTU Traveler which I have had for about 20 years. I still use it because MOTU still makes drivers for it.

[XRaym]

This video is excellent at explaining latency, driver, buffer etc, too bad it has such a generic title which cannot be found easily on youtube search.

[weberito]

About that directness you mentioned: „While ASIO4ALL and ASIO2KS use a low-level Windows audio API known as Kernel Streaming (also called "DirectKS", "WDM-KS") to operate, and ASIO2WASAPI uses WASAPI (in exclusive mode only), FlexASIO differentiates itself by using an intermediate library called PortAudio that itself supports a large number of operating system sound APIs, which includes Kernel Streaming and WASAPI (in shared and exclusive mode), but also the more mundane APIs MME and DirectSound. Thus FlexASIO can be used to interface with any sound API available on a Windows system.”

[dolby]

Slight correction. Pits and lands on a CD are both 0s and the 1 is represented by the transition. The receiver detects a phase change in the reflected light and pass that along to the buffer as a 1 bit.

[trmus]

As a Cubase user I'm really happy with my Steinberg UR22 MK1, is rock solid.

[Joshrrek]

obssessed with your videos lately. keep it up

[kiersplat]

On macOS, Audio-MIDI setup typically solves most of the issues you talked about by allowing you to create virtual aggregate and multi-output devices. However there are still a lot of limitations that have to be solved by third party software. Even though that software is open source and free these days, it's still annoying to have to install something for basic functionality. Apple you make a DAW you can do better than this!

[manlioyllades]

That was the reason to buy an RME for me. Just got tired of audio interfaces turning into door stoppers

[sblowes]

In macOS, use the native MIDI utility to build “custom” software-defined audio interfaces, using any and all audio I/O available to the device.

[studioruangsvara]

There’s only two basic approach for general use:
1. Low buffer size for Recording or use Direct monitoring feature from the I/O
2. High buffer size for Mixing or Composing and Producing with tons of VST.

Don’t worry about drivers.
Mac will always be using proprietary Core Audio, and Windows will only use ASIO 4 All (or provided driver from the manufacturer)

[hectordesantiago]

Drivers matter a ton. Still remember the day that my friend compared an Apollo Twin Duo vs a RME Babyface with latency.... I thought there would be no way that the babyface would have lower latency. It did, by a substantial amount... its the drivers. I bought a Babyface pro.

Still use it on live gigs to this day, that audio interface has never failed. Other audio interface manufacturers are also very good with drivers, but you definitely get peace of mind with RME.

Great Video brother!

[FranciscoMoroJr]

Please, show us your audio processing chain for your voice in the video! I love your channel 😍

[HoshPak]

I can vouch for the importance of drivers. As a student I used a cheap ESI DAC which had terrible Windows drivers. It would randomly distort the microphone and the support was not taking me seriously. It's only saving grace was that it was mostly USB class compliant, so it worked near flawlessly on Linux with ALSA drivers.

I got to try a couple more interfaces until I would finally settle for Audient as my go-to brand at home. Although I have yet to test its capabilities on Linux, on Windows it does a stellar job.

[OliChristenDrew]

Great explanation re buffer size and computer speed. It is also the reason why many use DSP assisted recording setups: It is simply a good deal! When your sounds (e.g. guitar amp sim) and your effects (compression or reverb on vocals) comes from the DSP on your audio interface that your monitoring with, the buffer size of your system does not matter anymore and you can run it on its maximum setting. This way a fairly old computer like a base $600 M1 mini is good enough to run VERY complex sessions, and you can still record on them if you want. By investing $1000 in an interface with DSP and some basic plugins you don’t need that $3000 Mac Studio or a custom built PC.

[aremenius]

It stopped me from making music for two years due to a fact that Focusrite just didn't bother for the older products. Just last month went for the RME UCX II and didn't look back, no regrets whatsoever.

[GGprods-ox]

UFX3 and ferrofish 16 mx have been the absolute best thing I've ever done.

Everything just always does and always will fucking work.

[danniielle]

Big fan of RME here. I have two Fireface UFX units here and love TotalMix and Digicheck.
I'm considering getting a UFX III as well so I can run Sonarworks in the interface DSP directly rather than as a VST in my DAW.