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MusicMac · Mar 23, 2001, 10:38 AM

Has anyone read any articles about OSX MIDI drivers? I have scoured the internet and can't find anything.

aleph_null · Mar 23, 2001, 02:49 PM

What did you want to know? There aren't any drivers for MIDI interfaces that I know of right now. But that's okay, because there aren't any MIDI apps (that I know of) that work on OS X right now. I'm betting that Nuendo will be first out the door.

FreeMidi, OMS, etc don't exist on OS X. OMS won't exist, Opcode being dead and all... In its place Apple has created a similar system, which does what OMS does, minus patch name management.

Writing an interface driver for OS X looks to be pretty straighforward, as does transitioning an app from OMS to OS X's CoreMIDI API. As with other things on OSX, driver loading will be dynamic, and an app can be notified whenever a new interface is plugged in, and get its name and capabilities. Should be cool.

It remains to be seen what 3rd party companies will do with respect to name management, sound librarians, etc, and whether they can all get along and use Apple's MIDI API and agree on a studio setup format. I hope so....

I expect music production on OS X will have a to wait a bit, in general. Maybe some support this summer, maybe later than that. It looks like Apple's taken a few steps to make sure OS X is a viable DAW platform, but its priorities for release 1 are clearly elsewhere.

-aleph

Big Red · Mar 23, 2001, 02:58 PM

I don't expect much for a while.

Where did you get your info on the midi stuff? Just wondering. It's really too bad about patch names not being supported under Apple's OMS fill-in. Maybe it'll come later?

I think Digidesign might be the first ones in. Their release of ProTools Free has peaked my interest, but without VST 2 support, I can't really do much. Nuendo might beat them in, but isn't that going to be an incredibly expensive app?

I'm anxiously awaiting news from Steinberg, Logic and others, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I'm more curious about what the future is for vst plugins. I don't really know how they work. Are they all too reliant on the old Apple toolbox? Since I don't think they're hardware reliant, could they run via classic in some way? I have a ton of the things, and I hope they'll be usefull in some future app under OSX. It'd be a real pain to have to update all of em.

Scott_H · Mar 23, 2001, 03:33 PM

I'm going to move this over to OS X Usage & Support . Please click through and find the topic.

[This message has been edited by Scott_H (edited 03-23-2001).]