Solid State Logic MadiXtreme manual Using the WDM/KS drivers Windows Vista

Using the WDM/KS drivers (Windows Vista)

In Windows 2000 and XP, multichannel audio cards were treated as surround devices. A 16 input/output audio card such as the Soundscape Mixtreme would be seen as a 16 channel surround device, a 64 channel audio card (such as the Soundscape Mixpander) would be seen as a 64 channel surround device.

Since this was not suitable for DAW software, the Soundscape driver implemented stereo and/or eight channel ‘virtual devices’ on top of the actual audio device.

In Vista, the way audio devices are handled has been changed several times by Microsoft. At the time of writing, only the first input and output virtual devices are seen by Vista.

Despite this, DAW applications should still be able to see all the WDM/KS devices, as shown here in Cakewalk Sonar:

Note however that most current audio applications can use the SSL Soundscape ASIO-2 drivers (including Sonar).

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