RCUS notes there’s a beta page for the Automap 3 beta for Mac and Windows:

Focusrite – Novation Beta

There’s a registration form for beta testers so you can stay up to date, but you can grab the download immediately. Sounds great to me, as more (quality) feedback can mean fewer bugs!

And what about the HUI support in Automap (which apparently includes the free Automap 3 Standard)? HUI, or Human User Interface, is the older version of Mackie’s control scheme, implemented over MIDI for more extensive control over DAWs’ editing features. HUI support (added first in the 2.0 ReMOTE SL operating system) gives you control compatibility with the wonderful, affordable Reaper DAW, plus Logic, Final Cut Pro (yes, the video app), Nuendo, Cubase, Ableton Live, and others. Some of those are supported separately by Automap, but others – like Final Cut, for instance – could be fun to try out.

Ableton Live controllers are suddenly everywhere, in commercial products and DIY creations. But an in-progress prototype being designed by Serbia-based creator Sasa Djuric, found on the CDM Flickr pool, goes the extra distance to integrate more effectively with the software. The hardware looks more like the on-screen UI, for starters – an elusive objective for many controllers. And by working with the Mackie Control protocol, Sasa is able to make communication between hardware and software fully bi-directional, so the controller gives you essential feedback. There’s even a facility for scratching. The design is based on the popular MIDIbox platform.

Sasa writes with details of what the creation process is like. It’s all still very much in progress, so we’re really excited to see how it evolves into a finished design.

Sasa explains (with videos to follow):

An increasing trend in video games is featuring brand product placement in the game design itself. Mackie is one of the first non-guitar brands familiar to readers of this site to show up in a game, with prominent Mackie PAs appearing in Guitar Hero III. (See comments: the Guitar Hero franchise apparently loves licensed brands.) Unfortunately, they’ve got some stiff competition: Guitar Hero’s original creators, Harmonix (now owned by MTV), have licensed the Fender Stratocaster design not only for in-game graphics but the guitar controller in their upcoming Rock Band. Weirdly-oversized Mackie graphics on the PAs just doesn’t match up somehow, much as I love Mackie. (Cooler would have been something less obvious, like, I don’t know, a Korg OASYS showing up in the post-apocalyptic world of Bioshock. Wait for a CDM mod of Unreal, I guess.)

I can imagine Music Technology: The Game, however. Fight the clock as you struggle to make weird MIDI controller messages match up with the jog function in your software! Discover realms of mystery and ancient puzzles as you struggle to decipher — the manual! Stare down a horde of vampire zombies carrying drivers incompatible with Windows Vista!

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

As Apple revealed in a description for a session at WWDC, OS X 10.5 includes enhanced USB and FireWire audio support. Some of that functionality is already arriving in the 10.4.10 update, which incorporates the FireWire SDK 24 and FireWire 2.1. (The SDK also includes “most” of the source for Leopard’s upcoming FireWire stack.)

You probably don’t care about that unless you’re a developer.

You probably do care that the 10.4.10 update can cause some FireWire audio devices to cease normal function, including the Behringer FCA-202 and Mackie Onyx Satellite. MacFixIt has the full details, and a workaround from Mackie:

Mac OS X 10.4.10 Special Report: FireWire audio interface issues — fixes

Basically, you can roll back the FireWire driver itself while leaving 10.4.10 in place. Of course, if you haven’t yet installed 10.4.10 and you own an affected interface, you might just leave well enough alone for now.

The “glass half full” way of looking at this would be to presume the full 10.5 update may not cause any earth-shaking driver issues, beyond a few fixes here and there. And we may have jumped over some of those issues before the full 10.5 issue hits. My Focusrite Saffire, for instance, is performing just fine under 10.4.10 on two machines. For anyone complaining about Vista, this is further proof that OS updates will generally cause issues with audio hardware, simply because, aside from class-compliant devices, most pro audio gear interacts with the operating system at a pretty low level. Low-level functionality just tends to break first. The question is, can you fix it, and how fast? (In this case, “pretty durn” fast seems to apply.)

Apple still releases more incremental updates compared to Microsoft’s fewer, larger updates, and Microsoft’s changes in Vista were more sweeping changes to the underlying driver model, compared to Apple’s incremental improvements to audio-specific features. The jury is still out on which is better; it’s still unclear to me, for instance, how much benefit the Vista driver model switch will have in the longer haul.

Just after making the Mackie C4 Commander software free (which works even without the Mackie hardware), Mackie has unveiled Reason support for their C4 control surface:

Mackie Control C4

There’s a PDF there with setup instructions. The C4 is becoming the go-to control surface for just about everything, with robust support for software like Live and Logic as well as Apple and Adobe video software, LCDs above each control, 32 endless encoders, and a US$1000 street. I know we have a number of happy users here. I could even see supplementing the new control features for the same apps in Novation’s ReMOTE SL with the Mackie, using one for synths and one for mixing. Now, all this cheerleading aside, I’d still like to see a more generalized, open standard for connecting control surfaces to software; I think it’d make life easier for both hardware and software makers. But that’s another story, and certainly the C4 works for a lot of people, and it’s nice at least that Mackie built it on MIDI rather than some proprietary standard.