Leopard, Alesis Drivers Redux
I continued my experimentation with Leopard and my Alesis MultiMix 8 FireWire this past weekend. I have excellent news to report as a result of those experiments.
I installed the new beta driver available from Alesis that specifically mentions Leopard compatibility in the resease notes on the PowerBook G4 I upgraded to test with the stable drivers a few weekends prior. I do not recall whether I updated the PowerBook to 10.5.1 first but I am not sure that is relevant based on my second experiment, see below.
I was tickled to find that the beta driver works without issue on PowerPC hardware under Leopard. I did several twenty and thirty second recordings to make sure the old intermittent static issue didn’t resurface. The sound was clean and consistent. I am a bit superstitious about my main system, a G5 desktop, so will wait until the drivers come out of beta, testing them first on this spare PowerBook. If you are less superstitious, you are probably safe using the beta drivers, now, if you have dire need.
I have a friend who was concerned about the same problems I was having, but he has an Intel Mac. To cover his questions, too, I installed the beta driver on my MacBook Pro, hooked up the mixer, and recorded the same samples. My MacBook Pro was then and is now running 10.5.1 and the beta driver also worked perfectly on my sole Intel system. Again, if you are comfortable using beta drives, I see no reason not to use these.
