Windows 11: other ASIO drivers disappear upon startup

[drjedd]

Hello, and thanks for reading me!

OS: Windows 11 up-to-date
FlexASIO: latest (1.9)
DAW: Reaper, VCV Rack, Pianoteq, etc.

I had a weird behaviour where all my ASIO drivers disappeared from the ASIO driver list after installing FlexASIO and restarting my computer. We're talking different drivers from different manufacturers: zoom, behringer, yamaha... installed at different times and otherwise running perfectly fine.
So after installing FlexASIO to try it out and restarting the computer, the ASIO selection list is empty in Reaper except for FlexASIO. Other programs also couldn't locate the other drivers, and programs like Pianoteq standalone would straight up crash if I selected ASIO in the driver type selection.

I did a little search and found this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/z0y934/asio_drivers_and_devices/
It describes the same exact behaviour, also on Windows 11, also using FlexASIO.

So sure enough I uninstalled FlexASIO and reinstalled the other drivers, and now everything works as expected: I can pick the zoom, behringer, yamaha drivers which all work well. Pianoteq doesn't crash upon selecting the ASIO driver type.

So my hypothesis is that either FlexASIO is calling upon the other drivers somehow and makes them unavailable, or that the driver itself has a problem that makes it impossible to fetch the complete list of ASIO drivers before some function somewhere returns an error that stops the fetching. If that makes sense.

Thanks for reading me, hope this is helpful somehow.

[dechamps]

There have definitely been cases where in some ASIO host applications, having some ASIO drivers installed simultaneously tends to not end well. One example of such a case is #86.

Your case seem to be different though. I am quite perplexed by your report because you are describing behaviour that seems much more severe: drivers completely disappearing from the list permanently (except FlexASIO, somehow) and, if I understand your report correctly, they disappeared from multiple ASIO Host applications at the same time ("Reaper, VCV Rack, Pianoteq, etc."). Also, I know there are quite a few Reaper FlexASIO users, and so far none of them complained about this behaviour.

The only hypothesis that comes to mind at this point is the FlexASIO registry script being misapplied somehow and behaving as if the ASIO registry key had ForceRemove set, but I don't see how that could possibly happen.

It would help if you could gather more information while the problem is occurring, such as:

• When the driver list is missing drivers, if you reinstall the other drivers (while keeping FlexASIO installed), do these other drivers reappear in the list or do you need to uninstall FlexASIO first?
• When the driver list is missing drivers, please post the contents of your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASIO and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ASIO registry keys (e.g. export the keys as .reg files and attach them). This is where the driver list is coming from, so if there are issues with the list, the root cause might be in there.
• It might also be worth capturing a log when looking at an ASIO driver list with missing drivers (do not select FlexASIO in the list - just open the list only). A log with Pianoteq crashing might also be useful, though I suspect it might be crashing for a different reason.

[dechamps]

Closing as no further information was provided to root cause or reproduce the issue.