The usual way to access your recording interface is by using an ASIO driver which bypasses the Windows Sound system completely to achieve best stability and lowest latencies.
Applications like your DAW and some music player also support ASIO.
But the Windows Operating System and most applications (Firefox Browser, Zoom communicator, ..) do not support ASIO.
For this you need a Windows compatible driver.
In the RME driver settings you can create such windows compatible drivers, called WDM (Windows Driver Model) driver.
Its not so good to enable WDM driver for each of the I/O ports that your recording interface has, because too many WDM drivers can put some stress to your CPU during boot, as the WDM devices become created dynamically by the driver.
So it's "best practise" to enable WDM driver only for those I/O ports, which are needed for your non-ASIO aware applications.
The 2nd TAB speaker is an optional thing, it takes care, that for the selected port you get a speaker symbol shown in the Windows Sound settings. An other difference I can not see, I regard this as an optional point that you can do or not do.
Keep the Windows Sound settings window open while configuring WDM in the RME driver settings, then you will see that the WDM devices in Windows Sound will be created dynamically depending on whether you create or remove WDM drivers on a per port setting.
I only add a WDM driver for the port, where I have connected the main monitors.
For you this might be Analog 1/2. My Monitors are connected to ADI-2 Pro which is connected to the UFX+ through AES.
So for me it is the AES port ...
Last step in the RME driver settings is to mark this port as Speaker device.
Then in Windows Sound setting make this speaker device to the standard sound device.
Done.
If you need more ports accessible by Windows or other non-ASIO aware applications, then simply add them in the RME driver settings ...
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14
