Comments on: WWDC Preview: Apple to Improve USB, FireWire Audio Support in 10.5

By: K Zustang

K Zustang — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:05:16 +0000

I don’t know what the bleep you guys are talking about, but it is obvious as always that Mac users just love Microsoft so much that they never miss a chance to mention it.

I have the simplest built-in FireWire interface and I make music on PIV pc with a FireWire Onyx 400F by Mackie. It works just great. No difference in latency and stability comparing OSX on a G4-G5. Vista performs better than XP on some parameters. networking over FW is not that important for many of us.

Where do you guys get off?

By: continuous

continuous — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 01:28:26 +0000

I wonder if the new firewire support means we’ll see new drivers from MOTU etc. I’m not so crazy about class compliant drivers for audio interfaces because issues seem to go unaddressed. Companies like RME develop excellent drivers and that seem to generally out perform class-compliant setups.

just my .02¢

I am excited about Leopard though.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:31:05 +0000

Well, and FireWire networking in general seems like a solution in search of a problem. Despite the fact that they drew criticism over it, I think Microsoft made the right call trying to trim some fat in their APIs, like letting DirectSound go in favor of cross-platform, open audio via OpenAL. (Vista still winds up being awfully huge, but …)

But I’m more interested in the enhanced audio capabilities in OS X. Driver-free / class-compliant always makes me raise my eyebrows. If we could get rid of all audio drivers and settle on spec, I’d be pretty happy. :)

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:03:59 +0000

It was also a part of XP but I think they didn’t bother with it in vista.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:25:03 +0000

Hi, Jerome — yes, definitely. (I think it was actually in one of the 10.1 releases, but I’m not sure.) But there’s obviously something new here in the FW driver department, whether that impacts networking or not… I’ll report back if I can get some more details. (And maybe this allows audio networking, since this is an audio event?)

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:02:31 +0000

Hey there,

Networking over FireWire is part of OS X since Jaguar (10.2), if not even earlier.

Jerome