Original 828 and Mountain Lion don't play nice together?

[MabelK]

I have an original 828 interface. It has worked great until I updated to Mountain Lion. All of a sudden I get intermittent stuttering, stops, and just flat out freezes. I can't use DP 7.24 (same issues) or even play ITUNES through the 828.
I bought a new firewire cable, and the Mac Pro is only 3 months old. I downloaded all of the newest drivers from MOTU. Same problem.
So I went into the "console" function under Mac utilities. Everytime the 828 would stop, stutter, or just stop working there was the same error message: "NSImage Composite to Point: operation is deprecated in Mac OS X". I looked NSImage up in Apple developers dictionary and it is an old, no longer used developers code.
Motu tech support told me that the 828's firewire connector was bad and I should buy a new interface. This one never disappears from the Apple firewire interface when I check "about this Mac" and click on "firewire". Besides that, it never disappears from the Apple Audio display. The Mac Pro sees it on the firewire port just fine, it is some kind of communication error.
So here is the question: if the firewire port on the 828 was bad then why would I get an error message about old developers code?
I bought the new interface, but I have a feeling that MOTU isn't supporting the old 828 anymore, or it needs a firmware update.
Does anyone else have some insight on this? I'm not really a computer person so any thoughts would be appreciated. I think the MOTU tech just blew me off and it is their driver and not the firewire port on the 828.

[mikehalloran]

There are some threads that refer to similar problems and Lion. I don't know if solutions were found.

[MOTU_Tech]

Hello,

I can confirm that there are no known issues with using the original 828 on OSX 10.8, as long as you are using our current FireWire drivers. In fact, Mountain Lion actually fixes the 'monitor input' feature that was broken in Lion.

An easy way to determine whether the driver compatibility is responsible for this problem is to test your 828 with a pre-10.8 system. If you can isolate the problem to the 10.8 system let us know!

Cheers,

[daniel.sneed]

Well, MOTU_Tech, you're welcome!
I'm very glad to see you writing here.

[MabelK]

Well to add to the stew of confusion and wonder, I have another ingredient. I bought a cheap external hard drive to use as a back up device. When I daisy chain the MOTU 828 through the external hard drive's second firewire port everything works perfectly.
So this tells me that the 828 isn't the problem, the cables aren't the problem, and the firewire ports on the Mac Pro aren't the problem.
Wish I knew that I could get everything to work perfectly before I spent $500 and a new firewire interface.
Shows what MOTU techs know.
So the take away is buy a cheap Western Digital My Passport Studio (about $100) and solve "ghost in the machine" issues.

[daniel.sneed]

Still in 10.6.8 here, with a 828 original.

I'm rounding eyes on this thread, for my next mac will have a ML OS (don't know when, though!).

828 classic works so well, that I've delayed any new interface for years. Thanks Motu!

BTW, cuemix may help my workflow, but is not a real question now, for I feed phones thru my Yam 01V instead.

[ctd]

I had nearly identical symptoms and timing wrt Mountain Lion and an 828mkII. Motu support suggested verifying the behavior on an older machine, and indeed I could duplicate the symptoms using iTunes on my wife's laptop, still running 10.6.8. My sad conclusion was that the 828 needed hardware repair.

[mikehalloran]

>So this tells me that the 828 isn't the problem, the cables aren't the problem, and the firewire ports on the Mac Pro aren't the problem.<

So, do you have the latest drivers?

[MabelK]

I have all of the latest drivers, and have tried installing Mountain Lion first and then the drivers, and then when that didn't work, I installed everything in reverse order.
I bought the Mac Pro at the end of June and had additional Apple memory put in. Since then I haven't had a chance to do much recording, so it isn't as if there is a lot of stuff on the Mac to conflict with anything.
I bought a MOTU Ultra lite mk3 hybrid and that works flawlessly. I really am impressed by it.

I think that there is just some random thing in my Mac Pro that doesn't dig the 828. I have an old printer, and I have the latest drivers for that, but then again those are from Snow Leopard era. Who knows? The weird error messages are what makes me sure that this is some kind of software glitch.

The best thing I can advise anyone is that if you can keep your 828 with your new Mac and 10.8.2 then that is great. But before you update to mountain lion don't forget to see what all of those peripheral gadgets have in way of mountain lion support. All those external hard drives, printers etc will need updated drivers as well.

I'm going to give the 828 away and let it find a happy home. Whatever the issue is far exceeds my cave woman brain, and I have wasted lots of time on this. Plus I have snatched myself bald in frustration (never a good look for anybody). It is just time to say: "I hope this helps someone else" and move on.

[prrcomm]

I'm having the same problem with the original 828 and Mt. Lion. MOTU no longer repairs a unit so old. Is anybody aware of a shop that WILL do such repairs?

[MabelK]

I ended up donating my original 828 to a local high school and they are using it. It doesn't seem right that MOTU doesn't support the legacy gear, but at the same time I shopped around and bought a MOTU UltraLite mk3 for about $500. There was just a point where my time and aggravation outweighed my obstinacy to stay with the original 828. To my knowledge all of my problems were caused by some kind of driver problem with the firewire bus. But that is just my best guess based on what I was reading on the Apple forums and the error messages that I was getting. The error messages referred to some type of old code that wasn't supported anymore.
On the other hand, if you find a way to get your unit fixed and it starts working perfectly with Mountain Lion then let us know. It's not as if it has a lot of moving parts inside the 828 to wear out so it would be interesting to find out what does go bad on these units.

[daniel.sneed]

Mine is ONLY ten years old, and just fine in 10.6.8...