[LAU] 64studio, FFADO, no luck

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Wed Feb 18 11:27:34 EST 2009


On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:41:34AM +0100, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 3:40 AM, Ken Restivo <ken at restivo.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > > There's a nice OS X-native Ardour2 out there.  Works a treat...
> > >
> >
> > Not on Panther, which is what the studio's Mac (G5) is running.
> 
> 
> You're going to run into problems with anything else you want to do on that
> Mac if you continue to insist on running Panther on it.
> 
> I appreciate your comments about valuing stability. But the reason that
> Ardour 2.7.1 exists, and JACK 0.116.2 exists, and OS X 10.5.6 exists is that
> the developers of this software, for the most part, were trying to fix
> issues that negatively impacted stability. yes, new features were part of
> the deal too, but i can speak authoritatively when i say that the new
> versions of Ardour and JACK are MUCH more stable than the old versions you
> keep running.
> 
> To give you an idea of the kind of problems in Panther - nobody has ever
> even succeeded in being able to build Ardour on panther, let alone actually
> run it. There are many, many important fixes that came out during the Tiger
> release cycle and now for Leopard. Its true that there were a few backward
> steps - the famous airport driver fix that trashed the audio stack - but
> these have been fixed and I very much doubt you will find any hardcore OS X
> audio users who feel that Panther is in anyway superior to later versions of
> Leopard or even Tiger.
> 
> 

I understand and agree with all you say, and thanks for setting the record straight.

However, in this particular situation, he's stuck with what he's got:
	1) This is not my machine. I can't tell the owner what to run on it.
	2) Tiger and Leopard cost money. The studio owner hasn't any to spend.
	3) It's an old G5. No idea how much slower Tiger/Leopard would run on it.
		Or what it would break. ProTools *must* run on it, and cannot
		be risked being broken, since that's what the bread and butter of
		the studio is. An "upgrade" that goes awry would be a disaster.
	4) I had a spare Mini-ITX mobo that I was going to lend/donate to
		use as a Linux Audio workstation. Alas, I can't do that because
		Digi won't support the efforts of the FFADO developers.

So the one option remaining is to try loading Ardour/JACK on the studio owner's MacBook Pro, which is (IIRC) running Tiger. It won't get him converted to Linux but at least it'd give him an alternative to ProTools.

Glad to hear that the native OSX port is done. I'll try to install it for him today if he remembers to bring his MacBook in to the session.

-ken



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