USB or Serial Ports for MIDI under OSX PT6

[houser]

Dear DUC people,

So we installed the latest, greatest of all things OSX last week.
OSX 10.2.5, PT 6.01 for HD etc..
All installs of course on separate drives
so that that we can boot back into OS9 and keep working.
No real snags actually apart from OSX midi on serial ports.


We could not get the stealth ports to works at all under OSX
with our Unitor 8s (dual Unitor 8s linked via RS232)
Same setup on the same stealth serial ports works great under OS9....

_But_ plugging the Unitors in over USB worked fine under OSX..
But that seems to give clearly less responsive action
when scrubbing in PT6, using MMC for our Virtual VTR setups..
(the VVTR still under OS9 with Igniter)
The old OMS setup for PT 5.3 under OS9 seems quite a bit snappier
than the new OSX core midi setup with the latest Unitor OSX drivers.
Not what we had hoped.....but it works...!

I must say I hope somebody at Apple/Emagic will write drivers
for serial ports that work under OSX... _if_ our
observations with regards to responsiveness in comparing
USB and serial ports are true.
Anyone else compared this?

regards
Janne A.

[Chief Technician]

To quote the Digidesign compatibility documents:

"Only USB MIDI interface are compatible with Pro Tools systems for Mac OS X. Modem-to-serial port adapters and serial MIDI devices are not supported with Pro Tools 6.0 and Mac OS 10.2.3."

To be more specific, Apple removed MIDI support for serial ports in Mac OS X 10.2.3.

[Stylin' Audio]

FWIW, I am using my MOTU Miditimepiece AV serial with a Stealthport on a new G4 (OSX only) with no problems yet. I figured I would try the Stealthport before forking out for a USB MOTU and the gamble paid off! [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

All I can suggest is make sure you have the latest driver for the serial adapter, and don't believe everything you read in the support docs.

[houser]

Well,

Apple may not have written drivers but the company
that makes the stealth port has:

http://www.geethree.com/

People have reported success with _one_ interface
but not cascaded Unitor 8s, which is what we want.
Again...the performance seems better for MMC...
perhaps slower buffering of data for timing, duno?

my 2 centavos
Janne A.