ASIO Windows Media Player Plugin (ASIOWmpPlg) is built as a Windows Media Player plugin that can play incoming audio through an ASIO device. The plugin is also supported by Windows Media Center application.

One of the main challenges of building a PC based music server is the difficulty of passing a digital audio stream from storage media to sound hardware without any modifications. The Windows audio stack was not designed to be bit transparent, and almost always distorts the audio stream. Some software/hardware configurations are known to be bit perfect. They are limited however to either a specific brand of hardware or to third party player software. The purpose of the ASIO plugin is to achieve bit-perfect playback by standard Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center applications for a wide variety of sound cards. It may be used on its own or together with the Sample Rate Doubler plugin, see www.sourceforge.com/projects/srdoublerwmpplg.

ASIO is an alternative software API and driver model developed by Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. It bypasses the Windows audio stack and lets applications to transfer audio data directly to/from memory mapped hardware buffers. This not only guarantees data integrity, but also shortens the latency between the time when an audio sample is recorded and the time when it can be played back.

Start Windows Media Player, go to Tools/Options/Plug-ins/, select the Audio DSP category and then ASIOWmpPlg plugin, click Properties. The plugin property page appears, where you can select which ASIO enabled audio device will be used for audio playback.

Requirements:
* Windows Media Player

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this audio utility software.