Affordable Rackable Audio I/O for newer Retina MacbookPro?

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alexdingley
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Affordable Rackable Audio I/O for newer Retina MacbookPro?

Post by alexdingley » Wed Sep 16, 2015 4:34 am

Here's my dilemma:

I'm gonna start using my macbook pro in a live situation.

Currently, I have an M-Audio ProFire 2626 (firewire400) audio I/O units for my portable music rig. The latency is really nice & low???which is good for my soft-synth & sampler work / They sound fine.... but there are no drivers for newer versions of Mac OS X. I've found a very reliable hack to some driver validation that allows the unit to work with older drivers, but I don't know how long that will be sustainable.

ALSO... this unit connects via firewire 400... The new MacBooks have NO FW i/o. Just Thunderbolt. Currently I use the apple Thunderbolt-to-FW800 adapter & then a FW800-to-FW400 cable to connect. This works okay, but the apple Thunderbolt dongle's FWconnector is hardly a strong & secure locking connector. I find that it could be bumped out fairly easily. In a live situation, I'm not gonna want to worry about that cable becoming disconnected. I use a bunch of rubber bands to hold it snug, as of late.

So, I'm thinking about going USB2.0 / USB3.0.

Does anyone here use a USB#.0 audio I/O for live soft-insstrument playing? Anything with 4 or more outs (not too worried about number of inputs) that has decently low latency & works well in Mac OS X (newer versions)? If it happened to have MIDI I/O, as well, I'd be thrilled.

Example: I'm looking at a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 because it's only $499. I'm not as worried about preamp/converter quality on my live soft-synth output rig... mostly just rock-solid drivers & rack-ability.

Keeping it under $600 would be nice too. I don't think I need an antelope to playback my 16bit Kontakt pianos & my Arturia soft-synths.

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Post by kslight » Wed Sep 16, 2015 4:52 am

Sorry to sidestep slightly but I was curious about your driver hack and if you had it working under Yosemite?

For some reason I thought I had seen a new driver for your model...but not mine (Lightbridge).

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Yosemite Fix

Post by alexdingley » Thu Sep 17, 2015 4:23 am

NO worries!

The issue is driver-signing related.

Run this command in Terminal and reboot, then your ProFire should start working in Yosemite:

sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1

It worked for me on two different Yosemite machines with my ProFire 2626's. But when the next OS comes out, who knows...


*If you're not terminal savvy; here's a quick explanation of what that is.

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Post by kslight » Thu Sep 17, 2015 4:50 am

Thanks I've held back from updating to Yosemite because of being afraid of what Apple will break...however with the impending release of the next major OS I am thinking that if I can get it to work with my Lightbridge then I'm probably safer updating to Yosemite now and then sitting it out for awhile again...I'm still on Mountain Lion...and though everything I use works newer versions of some software I use list Yosemite as a minimum requirement...like Pro Tools 12...though it runs fine under Mountain Lion too.

I do know a bit about Terminal so I should be good.

In theory, if I update to Yosemite and I can't make it work right, if I restore from a previous time machine backup I should be good?

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Drive Clone

Post by alexdingley » Thu Sep 17, 2015 8:07 pm

I wouldn't rely on a previous Time Machine backup to revert me to a whole OS. It might be possible, but your best bet is to clone the entire system drive before you do any upgrades. Hard Drives are cheap enough these days.

To that point, I recommend that anyone with an extra $100 buy a spare drive and just clone their system drive once a year / twice a year... just in case. If you're running a business from that machine, it's a very cheap way to guarantee up-time.

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Post by kslight » Thu Sep 17, 2015 8:33 pm

I used Time Machine to restore a boot drive a couple weeks ago, was no big deal?put in a new drive and set to restore to that drive?8 hours later was like nothing ever happened. I also have another internal drive that is an "extra" time machine backup of the whole system.

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Post by mrc » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:37 pm

You might want to look over at black lion audio. They show their idea of different units stock, and modded. I had my pro 40 modded and use it as an adat unit into an Rme card. There are drivers for OSX all the way back to the original 9652! I still have mine, and it's one of the early ones, but they stopped the Windows drivers at XP. They like that unit of yours a lot, does it have adat out and a standalone mode? For live work, 48k would seem to be plenty, and the funky FireWire connections always bothered me. The Toslink is much better. Mono price has really nice Toslink cables with a wire cover. It might take a bit, but you could probably find a used Rme card for what you want to spend (I've seen the early 9652 and 9632 cards sell around $100) and you can add more adat units and/or mod as you go. There was a Rme USB unit, maybe here (?) a while back. Maybe over at the UAD forum, senior moment ;) The new Audient 800 is a lot cheaper than the 880 I added to the pro 40 last year, but you need a unit with outputs, too. It seems people are dumping fire wire, so they will probably be a common used unit in the near future. The Magma boxes work well on Thunderbolt, have pass thru, and the Rme cards work in them just fine. IDK if that is what you want, but it works. Good luck!
Edit: Yeah, that Rme is here.

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Nick Sevilla
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Post by Nick Sevilla » Sat Jan 30, 2016 6:42 pm

Have you seen the Focusrite Clarett?

Thunderbolt, and super low latency.

Cheers
Howling at the neighbors. Hoping they have more mic cables.

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Clarett

Post by alexdingley » Sun Jan 31, 2016 7:29 pm

I ended up getting the focurite Clarett 8Pre???and it's awwwwwwwsome! Thanks for the suggestion Nick!! The pres are clean & loud?/ and the latency is insanely low... I can play back my 19GB piano sample through Kontakt, while recording 8 tracks during rehearsals... more than impressed with it so far.

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Re: Clarett

Post by Nick Sevilla » Sun Jan 31, 2016 10:53 pm

alexdingley wrote:I ended up getting the focurite Clarett 8Pre???and it's awwwwwwwsome! Thanks for the suggestion Nick!! The pres are clean & loud?/ and the latency is insanely low... I can play back my 19GB piano sample through Kontakt, while recording 8 tracks during rehearsals... more than impressed with it so far.
Cool, good to hear. I'm looking around for a mobile solution as well, but will only get if I get to go on the road.

Nice to know this one is working well.
Howling at the neighbors. Hoping they have more mic cables.

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Post by GooberNumber9 » Mon Feb 01, 2016 2:18 pm

+1 for the Focusrite Clarett line for thunderbolt interfaces. Very low latency and nice sound for the price.

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Post by drumsound » Mon Feb 01, 2016 11:11 pm

Has anyone compared the sound of the Clairett to the Scarlett?

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Post by GooberNumber9 » Tue Feb 02, 2016 5:30 pm

drumsound wrote:Has anyone compared the sound of the Clairett to the Scarlett?
Actually I have one of each so give me a day or two and I'll do a head to head. The Clarett features and control software are both enough to make me prefer it over the Scarlett, and that's not even considering the latency advantage and not taking up a USB port.

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Post by JWL » Tue Feb 02, 2016 10:32 pm

I look forward to your results. By all accounts the Clarett is an upgrade in sound over the (already excellent imho) Scarlet range. Will be nice to see....

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