ASIO driver support and ID3 v2.4 tagging

[dream scatter]

ASIO drivers were created by Steinberg to bypass the native windows sound module for professional audio applications and are pretty much the standard in the pro-audio community.

I only listen to music using ASIO drivers and I'm sure anyone else who is serious about audio would agree that ASIO provides clearer audio compared to the native muddy sound of windows/directsound mixer. I've seen a few comments of people requesting it so here is a thread explicitly dedicated to requesting this feature.

Also, a lot of media players still don't properly support the latest version of the ID3 tag standard, with extra features such as tagging multiple genres and artists, the standard is maybe a decade old! would be disappointing if a new media player would neglect it as well.

If steam wants to get into audio, might as well do it right, right?

[l33tpeas]

Hey walkingCABBAGE,

What OS are you using? If I'm not completely mistaken here, people started using ASIO for music playback on Windows XP because the native kernel audio mixer resampled everything to 48 KHz in a very non-bit-perfect way. Ever since Vista, Microsoft hasn't been doing any non-neutral processing in the kernel mixer. As long as your soundcard/onboard audio isn't doing any DSP and the DAC is getting a clean, unprocessed signal, even standard windows audio drivers should be just as bit-perfect as using ASIO.

That said I still greatly prefer ASIO for production and editing because of the reduced I/O latency and overall much greater quality when dealing with resampling and processing.

If you're really serious about music you're probably using an external DAC anyway. ASIO for music playback served its purpose at one time but is kind of unnecessary unless you're using XP or have doubts about the quality of your sound card.

100% agree with your comments about supporting the latest ID3 tag standard.

[dream scatter]

I use Windows 7 and I can totally tell a difference between ASIO drivers and DirectSound. I can't tell you exactly why that is, supposedly Windows 7 has some sort of new audio mixer but when I listen through it the bass frequencies get muddied and more boomy and the audio is far less clear, regardless of whether I use an external DAC or the built-in audio interface. Actually, I prefered the sound in Windows XP over Windows 7, I did some comparisons on my audio workstation a few years ago, especially playing youtube videos on XP sounded better than on Windows 7. I can't tell you why that is, I did some research a whlie back though and found that other people on the web agreed that XP was better sounding. I haven't experimented with WASAPI very much though, supposedly it is bit perfect in exclusive mode, if supported. Regardless, none of this matters if you are using ASIO drivers as it is the most direct.

[l33tpeas]

That's interesting to hear.

I'm no developer for the Steam client but Steam already has an audio input device selection in the options menu for microphones. Maybe an option for preferred output device would be nice to have in the future so you can select an ASIO driver. I don't know how much of a pain coding in hooks for using ASIO as the output device driver would be, but DirectSound is a Windows technology and the entire Steam ecosystem -- including SteamOS, Steam Music, and Big Picture -- is supposed to be cross-platform anyway.

Edit: grammar

[dream scatter]

I have no idea either to be honest, but there are plenty of other applications out there which support ASIO. Most media players don't support it without an add-on, but some new ones like the open source MediaPortal have native support for it and so do basically all other audio editing applications so I imagine it wouldn't be too far of a stretch for a major company like Valve to implement it (as it certainlty isn't new to do so in a windows application).

The primary issue I would foresee is that if Steam takes exclusive control of an audio output to play music, the video game may not be able to play back any audio if the audio isn't routed through the same application that has control over that output (steam), unless a different output is used. This is no problem for someone with multiple outputs or if the audio for video games does somehow get routed through steam and then combined. I imagine a lot of regular users would be quite confused by this--but then again, they probably wouldn't use the feature in the first place.

Although I don't honestly expect much, it's definitely worth at least a discussion.

[ReBoot]

How does a driver care for tags? Its up to the player app, not the driver.

[dream scatter]

The drivers and the tags are two unrelated points

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by walkingCABBAGE:

The drivers and the tags are two unrelated points

Ah, right. The OP looks like you mention them both in the same sentence, connected.