Wow this is getting hot. The amount of participation that this thread is receiving tells us that something is not quite right.
I figured out that the Kore audio interface creates new ASIO channels for each new ASIO client you run. If you have Kore you may have noticed the STATS dialogue where you can see things like how many errors have occurred, current sample rate & bit rate... and number of ASIO clients and number of ASIO channels allocated. Looking at this information whilst opening and closing ASIO clients led me to the conclusion that even with Kore each app needs its own separate ASIO playback channels which it does not share with other clients. However, Kore mixes all the ASIO channels down into a stereo pair straight away, without allowing you to set levels the way Totalmix does. If you want to change the level of the signal coming from, say, Cubase, you have to do that from within Cubase. FF400 lets you do this either from Cubase or from Totalmix.
The advantage with Kore is that the software always assigns the next available ASIO channel to the requesting application. Therefore the clashes that we've all seen with FF when two apps try to output on the same playback channel just cannot happen, for users don't have control over this. This makes sense to me becasue crackling audio is no use to anyone.
There is no question that Totalmix makes FF the MOST flexible audio interface on the market. However, it is this flexibility that inherently limits ASIO multiclient capability. Here is why:
Kore creates any number of ASIO channels ad hoc. All ASIO channels are mixed IN SOFTWARE and then they are sent to the audio interface over a USB connection. With the FF400 channels are sent UNMIXED to the hardware, where they get mixed by the DSPs. The advantage of this is, of course, the highly desirable near-zero CPU loading, but the disadvantage is that the number of ASIO channels is limited by the number of DSPs in the hardware. Therefore:
- With FF, more ASIO clients = more DSPs required (however this is physically fixed!)
- With Kore, more ASIO clients = more CPU power required
On a PC or a MAC CPU usage will eventually limit the number of ASIO clients that you may be able to use, but you are unlikely to ever need that many ASIO apps running together, and if you did... then upgrade your CPU.
In addition, imagine what would happen in Totalmix every time you added a new ASIO client: a new channel strip would be required in the middle row of faders. Similarly, the Matrix would have to be resized too.
The bottom line is that, as long as the hardware handles the mixing (and this is the way this is likely to be), we are stuck with this limited ASIO multiclient performance. It may be possible for RME to combine software and hardware mixing to fix this problem, thus embracing the best of both worlds :-)
