Re: everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
Re: everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
- Subject: Re: everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
- From: john <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 18:28:20 -0400
Hello,
I'm sure everything everyone is saying is correct, and you are all
certainly entitled to complain at will! However, may I make a plea for
the DigiDesign people?
Although many of you are far more competent at audio development than
me (I don't claim to be knowledgeable!), I can say first hand that
sometimes there are difficulties that are hard to understand in
situations when you are not working with whatever particular
hardware/software and don't know potential problems.
I can remember an occasional developer here and there writing in with
"advice" about getting our iMate ADB to USB adapter working properly.
Of course when I first started the project I thought it'd be relatively
simple, not realising I would end up working on it off and on (mostly
on) for almost 2 years, just for OS 9. There were unimaginable
complications!
Of course DigiDesign may indeed have Microsoft business tactics, but
perhaps it's just a pain to implement and they figured it'd be better
to have something rather than nothing?
Maybe I'm wrong...of course.
-- John
Something that everyone needs to realise here is that regardless of
the frustration that Digi's drivers cause for developers, the real
losers here are the end users. When they buy an mBox, they just expect
it to work with whatever software they choose. (Like any other USB
audio interface.) But they soon discover that their choices are
extremely, arbitrarily limited.
Developers should be willing to put up with a lot of frustration to
please their users. But in a case like this, there's really nothing
you can do except tell your users "sorry".
(Btw, I very much agree that the Digidesign marketing team should keep
their hands off of driver development. But this is the last I'm going
to say on the subject. I think the point has been made.)
-chris
You are totally right, Jim. I think that it would be excellent for
Apple to approve drivers, in some capacity, released by third-party
developers. If they could control the usage of "CoreAudio compliant"
in corporate advertising actively, we might see improvements.
Personally, I would go further and subpoena Digidesign to remove
"MacOS X" from their packaging until their software actually was
interoperable and was free of the guerrilla hacking of the HAL. But
since CoreAudio was designed to allow such behavior, I think that
Apple engineers will be much more sympathetic than I to Digidesign,
as it is, for some, a choice (whatever that really means, I
personally would never choose to buy an mBox at this point) to buy
the product and install the drivers.
From what I have seen, these CoreAudio drivers are a complete and
utter travesty; they are consciously designed to thwart
inter-operability to the best of the developer's ability. It is no
accident: you don't have to be a cynic to believe that Digidesign
made a conscientious decision to degrade the performance and
interoperability of other audio applications to support their Borg
marketing strategy. They absolutely have no business whatsoever
re-routing other hardware vendors drivers. Digidesign is
aggressively courting other audio developers to integrate their
software into plugin architectures, such that Protools remains a
central and essential tool. I am appalled by such
Microsoft-inspired marketing. Protools will never be every tool to
every musician; and its efforts to try to be so will only alienate a
wide selection of potential and existing customers.
Christopher
Hey Chris,
Just wanted to let you know that you are not alone in your
frustration with Digidesign. Indeed, their drivers are the WORST.
I have the Digi-001 and the DD coders developed the driver so that
your mac NEVER GOES TO SLEEP. I totally cripples a feature of Mac
OS X. As a result, I had to write a little app (DigiSleep Enabler
http://www.xmidi.com/digisleep.html) that removes their drivers and
reinstalls automatically. I've had over 100 downloads from people
from the Digi forum and at least 20 emails from people telling me
thanks for "fixing" Digi's problem. I've been on their customer
support trying to list this as a bug and they simply tell me it is
"expected behavior" for their driver. I can't tell you how
frustrating it is to see a company that is so INCONSIDERATE of the
OS that it is running on.
And as you have noticed, their drivers (despite the claim of working
with all apps) are only reliable with PT. Within Cubase, the audio
drops out randomly and frequently.
It seems to me that if a company is going to say that they've
released a CoreAudio driver, that it should meet some minimum
requirements, pass some standard test supplied by Apple. Digidesign
throws around that phrase almost as a marketing tool because their
"CoreAudio Drivers" only seem to work within PT.
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