Ableton Forum

Hi all. Just thought I'd share a few issues I've had since upgrading to OSX Snow Leopard.
My Specs:
Macbook Pro 2.33 GHZ 4 gig RAM
Various Cards: Echo Audio Fire 2, Digidesign MBOX 1, Inbuilt Audio (Core Audio)
Live 7.0.16

OK. So the first issue is with the MBOX. Before the upgrade the MBOX could use the standalone Digidesign driver to install the MBOX to work with Live. No more! It won;t even show up in the Audio/MIDI setup anymore.
However it will let you add it as a device in Live. BUT, the PACE system as well as the Digidesign MIDI drivers are not compatible with the new architecture. And trust me, you don;t want to have to scour your whole library folder to delete all of the "DIgi" kext files, preferences etc to get rid of it. Even going to /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers and deleting these will not stop you from having a console log full of failures in the background.
Also, this seems to effect going to the "all volumes" section of your file browser where live will keep crashing. You will really need to put your MBOX away forever after this.
Even with the internal card loaded many of these files will continue to load and cause driver issues, latency dropouts and a host of other issues.
The Echo Audio Fire 2 however has worked well. EXCEPT when we had to give a live demo lecture yesterday with the projector plugged in caused considerable MIDI lag. But no crashes thus far.
Also, BIAS peak 5 may also give you grief as well as older versions of Logic.
http://www.reasontolive.com.au
http://www.2fatdjs.com

Slightly off topic but the 2.33ghz macbook pro's can only take 3gb of ram, I'm assuming you realise that even thought it might state 4gb in profiler, it will only actually be able to utilise 3gb? It's a limitation of the memory controller on those models, the 2.4ghz models and upwards are able to address 4 and more.

Hmm interesting that I was not told that when I upgraded at the Mac Shop....I will investigate

Interesting. You are right. Activity monitor only displays 3 gig used however on MacFixit's website their explanation is it still uses 4 gig but keeps 1 gig for non accessible system uses:

"The MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo presumably uses Intel's 945PM chipset, which can physically handle 4 GB of DDR2 RAM. However, a number of items must be stored in physical RAM space, and when RAM reaches 4 GB, there is some overlap.
In other words, in a 3 GB RAM configuration, there is no overlap with the memory ranges required for certain system functions. Between 3 GB and 4 GB, however, system memory attempts to occupy space that is already assigned to these functions. For instance, the PCI Express RAM allocation occurs at somewhere around 3.5 GB of RAM and requires 256 MB of RAM. Thus, the virtual space between 3.5 GB of RAM and 3.75 GB of RAM is occupied by PCI Express data. So in a system with 3 GB of RAM, nothing is being wasted because the memory space required by PCI Express is still between 3.5 and 3.75 GB, and the installed system RAM does not violate this space.
The net result is that at least 3 GB of RAM should be fully accessible, while when 4 GB of RAM installed, ~700 MB of of the RAM is overlapping critical system functions, making it non-addressable by the system.
Ultimately, 4 GB of RAM may be installed, but not all RAM in excess of 3 GB can be used due to the possibility of memory "overlap"."

But thanks for the info

Yeah, only reason i noted it is that I have the same spec, but I actually got better performance with a 2gb and a 1gb stick, than i did with 2 2gb sticks.

i was told it actually uses like 3.3gbs or something.

Digidesign is always slow as hell to release updates. My Snow Leopard DVD is waiting patiently on the shelf till they get their shit straightened out.

If I didn't NEED protools for work I swear I'd never touch a Digi product ever again.

I hear ya. I had this romantic notion of using the Mbox with live so I could use the Focusrite pre's
Then I found all of the same issues came back to haunt me when I first installed this demon of a thing for my brother..
USB bus noise, crap updates and drivers, horrendous install stuff, doesn't work with other apps
My life again feels normal now that I'm loking for a real, universal sound card
Bring on my MOTU ultralite...
And that's not to mention all the PACE issues you have with them!