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Apogee Electronics stating that its Ensemble hardware, an expensive and highly regarded audio interface, will not be supported on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. This interface was discontinued less than three years ago and cost roughly $2,500 new. I own one. It used to be that when you bought expensive audio production hardware, you expected more than a few years of use.
But don't be so quick to blame Apogee. With El Capitan, Apple has discontinued development and maintenance of its FireWire Core Audio driver, which will cause problems with a huge number of other hardware devices as well.
Thanks again, Apple!
Which kind of leaves anybody with an old school mac pro out in the cold. Not that I intend to upgrade beyond where I am now at Yosemite in the next five years. But the new "pace of innovation" or rather the "pace of orphanage" is starting to annoy me. That and the iCloud roach motel of data (the ios 9 notes update lost a ton of my notes in the name of icloud sync) and the gradual locking down of the system is starting to make me feel like it isn't really my computer anymore and I'm very not cool with the direction Apple is moving.
DP 8.newest on MacPro 5,1 Dual Hex 3.33GHz 64G Ram, 3TB SSDs.
Thousands of $'s worth of vintage gear currently valued in the dozens of dollars.
Call me ignorant, which I no doubt am, but this seems to me to be an entirely selfish move.
I mean, how hard can it be to simply leave existing drivers / support in place? It's not like it'd take up much disk space, RAM or operating overhead, is it?
monkey man wrote:Call me ignorant, which I no doubt am, but this seems to me to be an entirely selfish move.
I mean, how hard can it be to simply leave existing drivers / support in place? It's not like it'd take up much disk space, RAM or operating overhead, is it?
According to the article in infoworld, it has more to do with security.
I've usually happily rolled along with the punches with Apple on technology changes, but this one would leave me royally pissed. I bought all of that gibberish about the superiority of firewire over USB and built my studio accordingly.
10 core iMacPro | 64 GB RAM | OS 12.6.7 | LOGIC PRO | STUDIO ONE 6 | CUBASE 12 | BITWIG 5 | DP 11 | MOTU Interfaces | Waaay Too Many Plug-ins | http://www.gesslr.com
Well, as far as El Capitan is concerned, my Apogee Rosetta 800 is still working under it. I didn't do a clean install so I don't know if the drivers are left over from Yosemite on my drive or if they are included in El Capitan. At some point I'll have to do a clean install and check it out. Right now I don't have a free partition for that experiment.
Phil
DP 11.23, 2020 M1 Mac Mini [9,1] (16 Gig RAM), Mac Pro 3GHz 8 core [6,1] (16 Gig RAM), OS 14.3.1/11.6.2, Lynx Aurora (n) 8tb, MOTU 8pre-es, MOTU M6, MOTU 828, Apogee Rosetta 800, UAD-2 Satellite, a truckload of outboard gear and plug-ins, and a partridge in a pear tree.
So Apogee Ensemble FW requires CoreAudio support for FW? I'm surprised. I figured that they had written drivers like MOTU.
That FireWire still works at all is pretty amazing. It was a big feature of the PPC but was never supported by Intel. Much of the hardware support is gone and not supported on any device with Thunderbolt as TB does not support the entire FW spec.
For MOTU, only the 1st generation 8pre requiress enough of the FW spec to require a direct connection. The rest of MOTU's FW devices work through the FW-TB adapter. MOTU FW interfaces work in OS 10.11. As long as they write compatible drivers, this is not expected to change.
Apogee discontinued the Ensemble FW a couple of years ago. They had to know something like this was coming. They could write drivers like nearly everyone else but how many companies do that for discontinued hardware? No, they want you to buy the Thunderbolt version. Isn't there an addon TB card for the Ensemble? I don't remember.
Last edited by mikehalloran on Wed Oct 21, 2015 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DP 11.31; 828mkII FW, micro lite, M4, MTP/AV USB Firmware 2.0.1 2023 Mac Studio M2 8TB, 192GB RAM, OS Sonoma 14.4.1, USB4 8TB external, M-Audio AIR 192|14, Mackie ProFxv3 6/10/12; 2012 MBPs Catalina, Mojave IK-NI-Izotope-PSP-Garritan-Antares, LogicPro X, Finale 27.4, Dorico 5.2, Notion 6, Overture 5, TwistedWave, DSP-Q 5, SmartScore64 Pro, Toast 20 Pro
Thanks for pointing out what might not have been initially obvious, Mike. The fact MOTU has created (and maintained) its own drivers means MOTU Firewire interfaces should not be impacted by Apple's move.
I certainly can relate to SixString's comment:
…the gradual locking down of the system is starting to make me feel like it isn't really my computer anymore...
The "Computer as an Appliance" is an approach with which I concur, especially in a recording studio. When DP works perfectly under a computer's OS, "upgrading" that OS for the sake of functionality that has nothing to do with DAW workflow is fraught with potential perils.
I looked at Apogee. They do have downloads for the FW version but only through Yosemite.
One of their selling points is the tight integration into Logic and Final Cut. Apparently, that's why the dependence on CoreAudio. It could be that, without it, you can no longer control the Ensemble FW from Logic. Their TB devices don't have this issue and are fully supported.
Apparently, it was their Symphony that has an addon FW card.
Not owning the affected unit, I have no idea if it can function at all without FW CoreAudio like MOTU. If it can, it should still work with DP even if you could no longer control it from within Logic.
DP 11.31; 828mkII FW, micro lite, M4, MTP/AV USB Firmware 2.0.1 2023 Mac Studio M2 8TB, 192GB RAM, OS Sonoma 14.4.1, USB4 8TB external, M-Audio AIR 192|14, Mackie ProFxv3 6/10/12; 2012 MBPs Catalina, Mojave IK-NI-Izotope-PSP-Garritan-Antares, LogicPro X, Finale 27.4, Dorico 5.2, Notion 6, Overture 5, TwistedWave, DSP-Q 5, SmartScore64 Pro, Toast 20 Pro
I've been reading articles like this for weeks. Usually the comments are about Apogee and Presonus devices. Some say they work, some say they don't. Invariably someone will chime in and say their MOTU FW interface works just fine under El Cap.
Yes, MOTU is very good about updating drivers and keeping their legacy devices operable, but as of now the FW drivers haven't been updated since 10/17/14, and everything still works and MOTU says so. So, there must still be more to the story. They are probably still waiting on 10.11.1 and so am I, but at the moment, based on completely anecdotal evidence, I would say that El Cap will not kill your MOTU FW interface.
Key takeaways for the average user (from the article):
This will either lead to a never-before-witnessed miracle of hardware companies updating drivers for recently discontinued products or a whole boatload of people who use Macs with hardware even only a few years old will not be able to upgrade to El Capitan. Or even worse, they won't pay attention, will upgrade, and will discover that they need to buy new hardware because downgrading back to a stable system with full data restoration can be quite difficult unless they planned ahead.
What is stopping the mfg(s) from developing a compatible driver? If the device is discontinued, I'd look to the mfg to make it compatible again. It sounds like a dirty trick on Apple's part, but according to the article, it closes a security risk. Maybe that's naive of me to believe, but whatever it is, we're at their mercy.
I won't be upgrading to EC anytime soon.
2013 Mac Pro 32GB RAM
OSX 10.14.6; DP 10; Track 16; Finale 26, iPad Pro, et al
