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.

A lot of people now split their recording time between on-location and studios, which for many people means buying two separate audio interfaces. Also, despite the fact that their needs are simple, they often wind up with interfaces that either don’t do quite what they need or, at the opposite extreme, are complete overkill. That’s why Mackie’s new Satellite Firewire Recording System looks appealing. It was introduced at NAMM in January, but it’s now available with a really low price: US$519.99 retail.

Here’s the idea: the interface is split into a docking station and mobile FireWire interface, so you can eliminate cable replugging and carry only what you need.

Mackie has released a free-for-download version of their C4 Commander software. Before we start warping this to our own purposes, let’s start with how Mackie likely intends this to be used. The C4 Commander software maps knobs and displays to a wide variety of software, plug-ins, and external MIDI hardware (new and vintage), either via included maps or via your own custom configuration. That in itself is nothing new; what is new is that Mackie is now letting you download this useful software even if you don’t own the hardware. If you don’t have a C4 Commander hardware device, you can run the software on your computer and tweak knobs on-screen.

C4 Commander Software: Information and Free Download [Mackie.com]