You might want Audacity to work with the ASIO drivers supplied with your sound devices. Commmon reasons for this are:
- Only ASIO drivers are available (eg Behringer mixers)
- Performance - ASIO has low latency (delays)
- You don't want to use the ASIO4All bridging driver with non ASIO drivers
- Multi channel support - though Audacity is not so good at handling other than Stereo or Mono
Due to licensing restrictions the Audacity team cannot provide a prebuilt version with Windows ASIO driver support. But with this guide and script you can easily build your own Audacity with ASIO support.