ASIO4ALL

ASIO only works if the sound card's manufacturer has written a driver for it, and the audio chips built into laptops rarely get one. Michael Tippach, a German developer, solved this with a wrapper: the DAW sees an ordinary ASIO device, while ASIO4ALL actually talks to the hardware through WDM Kernel Streaming, bypassing the Windows mixer. Latency drops from hundreds of milliseconds to something you can actually play through.

Throughout the 2000s it was the first answer in every home-studio forum thread. The catch is that it likes to grab the device exclusively, so the browser goes silent the moment the DAW starts — a support question as old as the driver itself. With a proper audio interface and its own ASIO driver, you don't need it at all.