Not all sound cards are created equal and while this may not be a problem for playing an email alert, recording and editing audio has much more demanding requirements.

The ASIO standard was created by Steinberg to improve the performance of Windows Audio. ASIO4ALL is a clever utility that offers the benefits of ASIO for all sound cards, even if the manufacturer has not released specific software.

It works with all audio devices that have a WDM driver installed already. If the ReWuschel option is selected on install, software such as Reason can use the inputs as ReWire.

Full instructions are installed with the software as a PDF file and there is also a forum on the ASIO4ALL website.

This is a very useful utility for improving the performance of audio recording software without having to buy new hardware. It cannot improve the recording quality of cheap hardware but it does at least offer the opportunity to try audio tasks without having to spend money.