I really don't use Windows so I can't verify this, but it makes a lot of sense. This implies that, to use the mixer as a standard Windows audio device you just plug it in that there is, in fact no driver required because it's using the standard WDM USB audio driver built into Windows. Note that ASIO4ALL is an ASIO driver that hooks into the standard Windows WDM device. MOTU) with a bargepole.īy using a generic driver, and by pushing people towards something like ASIO4ALL, you get the benefit of continued support into the future. If they decide the product is 'End Of Life', then they often don't bother and your device ends up as landfill.įor this reason, I wouldn't touch certain vendors (e.g. You are then fully reliant on the device vendor to produce a new version of the driver for your new OS. Where vendors provide their own proprietary driver, these drivers go out of date eventually, and it's common to find you can no longer use the device if you upgrade your OS. I suspect they are just applying some common sense. The driver may also ship with utilities such as proprietary mixer/dsp control apps. The 'driver' will often also contain additional information that cannot be described on the standard USB interface such as MIDI port naming and onboard mixer connectivity mapping. The Boss driver will contain configuration information to tell the standard driver that the stream should be interpreted as 2x2 channel rather than 1x4 channel. 'quadraphonic') capture stream when it is, in fact, 2 parallel stereo channels (one is 'wet' the other is 'dry'). When they ship a 'driver' it is often just additional configuration to fix stuff on the USB interface that is broken or proprietary.įor example, the Boss GT-100 USB interface looks like a 4-channel (e.g. In fact, what most people refer to as 'drivers' on Windows aren't really full drivers at all: almost all USB audio devices are based on the USB audio standards and will use the standard USB drivers built into Windows (or ASIO4ALL if you want to use ASIO).

On Linux, for instance, they are plug and play using the standard built-in USB audio driver. This means they don't implement any vendor-specific nonsense and, as such, should be able to use a standard USB audio driver. The Xenyx mixers are 'class-compliant' audio devices.

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