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ASIO Support

For Vista-or-later Windows operating systems (e.g. Windows 7) , M+O requires ASIO support.  ASIO is also recommended for earlier versions of Windows.  

ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output)  is an audio driver protocol developed by Steinberg Media Technologies that provides reliable low-latency access to the audio hardware on a Windows computer.  Low latency is especially important in an application like M+O since the program's responsiveness improves as latency decreases.  

While never supporting true low-latency audio without ASIO, pre-Vista versions of Windows provided an audio protocol that was adequate for M+O.   Unfortunately,  support for this protocol was downgraded with the release of Vista, making somewhat-low-latency applications, such as M+O, no longer possible.   Also unfortunately, the compensation for this downgrade provided by Microsoft, the new "WASAPI" protocol, delivered poor performance for low latency audio, making ASIO the only possibility for M+O on Vista-or-later computers.  
   
Fortunately, ASIO is easily accessible, even without any special purpose audio hardware.  If you want to use your computer's internal "onboard" audio hardware with ASIO, you can install ASIO4ALL for free.  Thanks to Michael Tippach for this highly useful contribution!  As discussed in Speakers and Microphones, external audio hardware, such as USB or Firewire audio interfaces or PCMCIA cards, provides better audio quality than internal hardware, and nearly always come with an ASIO driver.   Such hardware provides the best overall foundation for M+O.