There are persistent rumours of Steinberg opening up licensing, but without any apparent movement.
AUDACITY PULSEAUDIO CODE
If ASIO support were distributed in Audacity builds this would either violate Steinberg's licence agreement if the code were included, or conversely would violate Audacity's GPL Licence if the code were withheld.
The ASIO technology was developed by German company Steinberg and is protected by a licensing agreement which prevents redistribution of its source code.Īudacity, as an open source program licensed under the GPL, is therefore currently unable to support ASIO, despite being ASIO-capable (providing the user's sound device is similarly capable). Core Audio also has lower latencies than Windows under MME and Windows DirectSound but Jack OS X can be used for lowest latency.
On Mac, Core Audio is the standard API and is fully supported by Audacity. Current Audacity supports JACK fairly well, but with some limitations. For lowest latencies, you can use the JACK API that provides both low latency audio communication and audio routing between applications. PulseAudio sits between the sound source and the Linux kernel and thus has somewhat higher latency than direct use of ALSA. However, many Linux distributions now use PulseAudio by default for audio routing and mixing. On Linux, the standard ALSA audio API typically provides lower latencies than Windows under MME or Windows DirectSound. This will give support for multi-channel recording on some sound devices, but not the very low latencies that are possible on ASIO. To use it, select "Windows DirectSound" as host in Device Toolbar. Audacity includes support for Microsoft's Windows DirectSound interface protocol.