Options

Audio Output: This is where you choose how DarkWave Studio sends the output generated in the Studio to your computer's sound hardware. You can currently choose to use either one of two drivers for output: Wave Out and ASIO.

Wave Out: This is Microsoft Windows' default method for sending audio to play on sound hardware. It should be compatible with any sound card. There are three choices: Device, Format, and Latency. Device is which sound card to use. Format lets you choose Sample Rate, 8/16 bit audio, and Mono or Stereo. You should probably stick with a format with 16bit sample format and stereo. A sample rate of 44.1kHz is CD-quality. You may want to use a higher sample rate for higher quality on fast computers. The sample rate you choose is used internally by DarkWave for synthesis and processing of audio so on a slow computer you may like to use a lower sample rate. Latency is how many milliseconds of audio data to buffer before sending it to the sound card. Lower latency is always a good thing when playing a MIDI keyboard so that you hear the notes played very soon after hitting a key. You should set the latency as low as you can without clipping occurring. Clipping sounds like a damaged CD skipping. If you get clipping increase the latency until it stops.

ASIO: This is Steinberg's way of sending audio signals to sound cards and can achieve very low latency. It is mainly used by professional sound cards. Unlike Wave Out, it supports more than two channels (Stereo). You can choose the ASIO device to use (if one is present) and choose the output format.

VST Paths: In this options dialog you can specify additional directories to search for VST plugins when DarkWave starts by clicking the Add toolbar button and browsing for a directory. That directory and all sub-directories will be searched at program start for VST DLLs.