Upgrading to Leopard: Audio Rig Compatibility with NI, MOTU
Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music has some updates on Native Instruments and MOTU compatibility with Leopard. He points out that it’s the first OS X upgrade without real benefits to musicians. It seems to be causing more problems with audio software compatibility than previous releases. As I posted yesterday, Logic Pro won’t open if you’ve got Melodyne ReWire enabled. Native Instruments “kind of” works, but not at all if you need to use the installers, and MOTU is still testing their stuff.
Er… wrong Leopard…
I’ve gone whole hog and upgraded both my Macs to Leopard. Aside from Logic failing to run while the Melodyne ReWire files were still lying around, it’s gone smoothly on my music-making machine. My iBook, on the other hand, has had to suffer a bit more with quite a few repeat visits to the install disc. Mind you, one of these times was thanks to my own stupidity in trying to get a Tiger-tested version of XAMPP to run on Leopard.
How long before it’s safe to upgrade? That really depends on the third-party companies, as Apple’s done their bit to get audio software up to grade. If you can’t live without MOTU, Native Instruments, or Melodyne integration with Logic, then you might want to hold off for one-to-two months.
Melodyne have not published any news regarding Leopard compatibility on their website, but MOTU and NI are both posting ongoing updates on their websites as they get these issues sorted.
Has anything in your audio rig broken after an upgrade to Leopard? Have you noticed anything working after a clean install that didn’t work after a standard upgrade install? Let us know in the comments - and if you have any fixes for the problems, please do share!
October 30th, 2007 at 10:33 am
This doesn’t sound like an “audio” problem, but bear with:
my itunes seems to be skipping about a bit, there’s this random distortion when playing music. This makes me wonder how Leopard is dealing with more Pro audio apps…
October 31st, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Wow, hadn’t had any problems with iTunes here at all after my upgrade. I only use it on my Mac mini, though, so I haven’t tested on the iBook.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Yes - intermittently, Leopard will ‘lose’ the onboard sound on my iBook, and I can’t get my m-audio fw410 working AT ALL.
Pissed.