Audacity need High-end Audio System

When doing audio editing/compositing in Windows I use REAPER exclusively (a software by creator of Winamp). Why? First its insanely lightweight in both term (speed and size) and second it does support ASIO backend.

Casual user often neglect the meaning of latency simply because they rarely feel it while doing single mp3 file editing. Try edit and record multitrack audio, you will know how important is latency. Audacity as it once a linux software that support jack audio (in Linux) a similar ASIO alternative. But when JACKDMP (windows version of JACK) ported successfully audacity (win32) not even put it as an option. Weird eh? My mistake, vanilla Audacity 1.3.8 does have DirectSound support! Mine must be obsolete lol! :D

IMO, there is another option that quite good, that is SDL (used by LMMS). But it seem audacity overlooked it while feel happy with portaudio (MME) instead.

However audacity does support DirectSound and ASIO as long as you provide the required library don't know about JACKDMP though. Try to build that!

edit: just tried to build it, it seems everything fine. DirectSound and ASIO enabled. Jack also suported as ASIO device though "looks heavy" (I prefer ASIO4All still).

here: Audacity-1.3.8.exe

(this is just minimal unicode binary, no dlls and you may need to download VC2008 runtime, Jackdmp, ASIO4ALL and other addons)

WARNING: this is my personal build you are not authorized to use it :)) Well that will break GPL term. if you insist :p