I have spent 2 days searching the web for USB-DSD USB drivers for my new to me North Star Incanto DAC. Their website is gone and wayback machine only has one ZIP file which doesn't install drivers on windows (at least on my computers, fails every time)
Does anyone out there have the driver package for North Star or whatever I might need to get USB working on this DAC?
Look forward to any help.
Thanks!
PS Using Foobar-2000 as a player in WIN 7 if that makes any difference
Does anyone out there have the driver package for North Star or whatever I might need to get USB working on this DAC?
Look forward to any help.
Thanks!
PS Using Foobar-2000 as a player in WIN 7 if that makes any difference
Last edited:
Excuse me if I am wrong but a Universal Serial Bus doesn't need drivers to connect to any OS. To make a programme work, maybe.
Take a look here; https://www.xmos.ai/software/usb-audio/driver-support/
Take a look here; https://www.xmos.ai/software/usb-audio/driver-support/
Thank you for the link...here is the wording from the manual.....I still think I need the drivers.
Driver Installation
The Incanto, in USB mode configuration, need proprietary drivers to be installed in the PC. Drivers
are available for different Operative Systems:
PC XP, Vista/Win7/Win8 (both 32 and 64 bits)
Installation
1) connect the Incanto input at one of the USB2.0 port of your PC
2) your PC will search for new drivers
3) insert the CD-ROM with drivers supplied with the unit
4) the drivers will be installed automatically
5) select in the Audio preferences of the OS, like preferred output device, the North Star Design PCM-DSD USB Audio Interface
Driver Installation
The Incanto, in USB mode configuration, need proprietary drivers to be installed in the PC. Drivers
are available for different Operative Systems:
PC XP, Vista/Win7/Win8 (both 32 and 64 bits)
Installation
1) connect the Incanto input at one of the USB2.0 port of your PC
2) your PC will search for new drivers
3) insert the CD-ROM with drivers supplied with the unit
4) the drivers will be installed automatically
5) select in the Audio preferences of the OS, like preferred output device, the North Star Design PCM-DSD USB Audio Interface
Yup, thanks, found that same page on wayback but the link goes nowhere or to a dead page...or is it implying that a generic ASIO driver might work? I have ASIO drivers on the computer for MicroMega MyDac but I ended up using the MyDac drivers as I couldn't get ASIO working with Foobar2000.
Thanks
Thanks
No, I haven't tried that yet. I'll look into it and find out how it is different than what I have installed.
Thanks!
PS Knowing how goofy windoze can be sometimes, I wonder if it is specifically looking for the drivers on a CD, like the manual suggests? Wonder if it is worth it to find an old burnable CD and try that? Attached is the ZIP file of the drivers I found on the wayback machine from North Star Design
Thanks!
PS Knowing how goofy windoze can be sometimes, I wonder if it is specifically looking for the drivers on a CD, like the manual suggests? Wonder if it is worth it to find an old burnable CD and try that? Attached is the ZIP file of the drivers I found on the wayback machine from North Star Design
Last edited:
nope...
that's because Windows has been really late on supporting UAC2 (USB Audio Class 2.0) standard. IIRC, support have been added only since some updated version of Win 10.
There's no such thing as a “generic ASIO driver”. It's simply impossible: the whole idea behind ASIO is to by-pass the entire windows audio subsystem, connecting directly to the hardware. Obviously that can be done only with a low level driver which is specific for a given hardware. What perhaps may exists in this case is a "generic" UAC2 ASIO driver. That is, one which can work with any "Class Compliant" USB 2.0 audio interface. Though I don't know if any such driver does actually exists. You may try searching for one.
N.B.: the suggested "asio4all" is NOT really an ASIO driver. It's only a "wrapper" which provides an ASIO interface on top of (connected to) a native Windows audio interface (and it's driver). That is, asio4all is just meant to allow the use of software which only supports output to ASIO with hardware which does not have any real ASIO driver. Obviously, it offers no advantage whatsoever WRT using the native windows audio interface directly, if that's possible.
Given that Foobar 2000 does not require ASIO (it supports natively all kind of Windows audio interfaces), you do not need to use asio4all. You'd better off avoiding the use of an unneeded extra software layer and use the available native interface (e.g. Kernel Streaming or whatever) directly.
It makes sense to use ASIO only if you can find a real ASIO driver supporting your hardware.
Last edited:
Thanks for all of your explanations, much appreciated.
Would this mean I need to update to WIN 10 (which I would rather not do as all boxes in the house are happily networked on WIN 7) or is it possible Microsoft has updated support in WIN 7, although unlikely as 7 support ended a while ago.
It seems my simplest option would be to keep looking for the driver package that came with the DAC, or figure out how to get the one I have to work, which is supposed to be the correct one.
Thanks for your help.
cheers
If your dac appears in device manager you can install the drivers from the extracted folder from there. Alternatively, you can run setup from the folder.
Thank you! I was able to manually install the driver by pointing windows to the .inf file in the DAC folder and shazam! It installed! Yeah.
And now...... you thought the journey was complete, HA! not with Windows....now Foobar freezes as soon as you play a file, complete lockup. As well, now the DAC doesn't output anything from windows sounds, whereas before the drivers were properly installed I was able to use the audio test function from the volume control in windows and get output from the DAC. Also, the DAC doesn't think it is connected anymore, just flashes USB whereas before the drivers were installed it displayed 44 which is the default sample rate within the setup screen for windows.
ARG! I hate windows. It has been suggested by someone to install Linux, which I may do someday soon if I can't get this sorted.
Any thoughts now on how to get this working within windoze?
Cheers and thanks!
And now...... you thought the journey was complete, HA! not with Windows....now Foobar freezes as soon as you play a file, complete lockup. As well, now the DAC doesn't output anything from windows sounds, whereas before the drivers were properly installed I was able to use the audio test function from the volume control in windows and get output from the DAC. Also, the DAC doesn't think it is connected anymore, just flashes USB whereas before the drivers were installed it displayed 44 which is the default sample rate within the setup screen for windows.
ARG! I hate windows. It has been suggested by someone to install Linux, which I may do someday soon if I can't get this sorted.
Any thoughts now on how to get this working within windoze?
Cheers and thanks!
Well boys and girls, I figured it out! Finally after 6 hours of searching and reading and learning....and finding the correct drivers. Turns out the original driver package I had was for SPDIF output, not USB, and it kept crashing the computer. After several more hours searching with the right search term, I landed a site in Taiwan that I managed to find an archived Google drive folder that had the drivers I needed to make this work.
Here is the site for anyone else who may need these drivers for a North Star Design DAC, I think they all used the same driver package.
Thanks for all your help, appreciate it as always.
Cheers
North Star Design DAC drivers
And I'll also attach the ZIP file here in case the Google drive site fails one day.
Here is the site for anyone else who may need these drivers for a North Star Design DAC, I think they all used the same driver package.
Thanks for all your help, appreciate it as always.
Cheers
North Star Design DAC drivers
And I'll also attach the ZIP file here in case the Google drive site fails one day.