Via menu entry Preferences|Audio you get access to the basic audio-preferences of VSampler.
The settings page "DirectSound" manages basic preferences for the DirectSound operation of VSampler:
At the right side of the window you see a list of all DirectSound devices of your system. A special device is the "Primary Audio Driver", that's the DirectSound device which has been set as "preferred device" in the Windows control panel. VSampler uses this device as default in it's preset-output-selector (see Working with Presets). You can change that at the dropdown menu Default Device.
Every DirectSound device possibly provides additional capabilities, such as support for Environmental Audio Extension (EAX) or 3D-sound. The activation of those functions can be set up for every device separately at the Device Options panel (upper right of the dialog window). The activation of EAX or 3D toggles the availability of the respective control elements at the "Effects" page (see Working with Splits).
With the button Device Capabilities you can access the device properties. Basically VSampler supports every DirectSound enabled soundcard. Some DirectSound drivers only provide an emulated DirectSound mode (emulated driver). VSampler doesn't work satisfying with those drivers, typically the sound will "stutter". Additionally the latency behaviour of VSampler will be affected by the fact if the soundcard got a hardware-buffer or not (hardware mixing). Most modern soundcards do have a hardware buffer.
In the panel Output Settings you can adjust the latency behaviour of Virtual Sampler. The following settings are available:
The "ASIO" page manages basic settings for the ASIO operation of Virtual Sampler:
The ASIO device used by VSampler is defined at the ASIO 2.0 Device dropdown menu. For every device you can set up samplerate and buffersize. Usually you should leave the default settings untouched, because they have been adopted from the ASIO settings of your system.
The button ASIO System Control gives access to the global ASIO settings dialog of your system. Below this button you see the measured latency values for the in- and output.
The checkbox Enable ASIO activates the ASIO functions of VSampler.
At the right side of the window all in- and outputs of the selected device are listed. All in- and outputs are stereo and can be activated or deactivated separately. If you select an in- or output the respective buffer format will be shown. At the moment Virtual Sampler supports the buffer formats 16 (16 bit integer) and 18 (32 bit integer). Most ASIO cards allow to set up the buffer format by the native ASIO setup dialog of the card manufacturer.
The preferences page "VST" manages basic settings for the VSampler VST instrument:
In the input field VST Channels you can specify the number of available VST mixer-channels. You can activate up to 16 VST channels to make them separately available for the Cubase VST mixer.
In the input field PlugIn Search Directories you can tell VSampler to scan additional directories for VST plugins and VST instruments. The single path names have to be separated by semicolon.
The option "Wave Preview Settings" is used to activate preview of WAV-files from within the VSampler Browser and in the file open dialogs. When activated, VST channel 1 is used for playback, otherwise the default Windows sound output device is used for sound output when previewing samples.
The option "Processing Settings" allows configuration of options for sound processing within VST. Normally the option "Use ProcessReplacing" should be activated because if provides performance optimizations.