Is it possible to use Scope on an Intel Mac using Win XP?

sonicstrav · Post by **sonicstrav** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:19 am

Why not use Win XP drivers - would it work - running XP on a Mac?

As there are no OS X drivers ???

Fluxpod · Post by **Fluxpod** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:31 am

The new macs have only Pcie slots so you would need a magma pci expander.
Not sure how good that would work(or if it works at all).

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:57 am

there is absolutely no reason - other than the design

to buy a Mac if you want to run XP on it.
The Mac advantage is gone since a decade, OSX may be a bit less crowded by spyware than XP Vista, but in the end you dunno wtf Apple is doing during online OS updates...

Macs were more stable and easier to handle, when the OS had # 7
those days you could trash any PC versus a Mac
with OS # 8 Apple got astray from it's former strictly business, for the rest of us... path of products
version # 9 sealed the fate and was only introduced to force people on the X-train
Apple's next big thing - which is their implementation of M$'s Cashing On the Upgrade Spiral...

cheers, Tom

Post by **hubird** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 1:37 pm

astroman wrote:Macs were more stable and easier to handle, when the OS had # 7
those days you could trash any PC versus a Mac
with OS # 8 Apple got astray from it's former strictly business, for the rest of us... path of products
version # 9 sealed the fate and was only introduced to force people on the X-train
Apple's next big thing - which is their implementation of M$'s Cashing On the Upgrade Spiral...

cheers, Tom

well, if your story about the 'Cashing On the Upgrade Spiral' is true, then that is exactly the reason why there's still... Apple

Without sales no company, and you may dislike the methode yet you must agree Apple still makes top machines, so there's no 'making fast mony' involved.

Personally, as a simple computer user, I'm glad there's OSX.
You may look at it as a programmer/sales policy obeserver/principal lover of the first idealistic hours/hater of DRM tricks(?) etc., but to me it's a superiour system with more stability (almost 100%) and a nice, clean interface with a lot of handy stuff regarding finding files, organising them, etc.
Yes, they lost the one and only finder principle, if you have multiple windows of the same folder open these are nor instamntly synchronised.
I regret that also.
But compare the 'system preferences' window with the way windows organises all the information of all the dialogs included.
A world of difference, and that's said weakly.

But you remember the old boring tricks necessory after a crash of Cubase caused by ASIO loss etc.?
Restart, deleting prefs, restart, starting Scope, starting Cubase...shit, deleting the prefs again, as the system still suffers from system problems, etc. etc.
And thiese tricks were even nothing compared to the situation on pc in the same circomstances.
And now Cubase SX even knows at what point my song was before Cubase crashed (hardly ever).

With all my respect for your knowledge and visions, but you can't stay dreaming about system 7, that's 20 years ago!
I myself started with system 8, when pc-windows didn't even count.
Apple is 'just' a company which has to make sales.
In the meanwhile OSX is the only computer system for multimedea use which works out of the box, without having to have Gary around (heil to the man, even if he says he hardly tweaks).

I can tell you about the absurd experience I had with my brother last week, who just had a new pc with Vista.
We tried to install a p2p program, fiddled a bit with another program also, and within half an hour the whole system got stucked! No idea what exactly got wrong.
It didn't even restart at the end.
Ha! my prejudice got true faster than I wanted it for my brother, but I couldn't help it eihter

oh well, I'm alone on this, I shouldn't do this, sorry

Post by **hubird** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 3:22 pm

hm, was Apple in trouble befor the ipod?
If so I'm glad with the succes of the ipod

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 3:36 pm

hubird wrote:...Personally, as a simple computer user, I'm glad there's OSX...
...But compare the 'system preferences' window with the way windows organises all the information of all the dialogs included.
A world of difference, and that's said weakly.

you may have a look into your library folder... and hope you'll never have to to deal with (or tweak) anything inside that one...

...With all my respect for your knowledge and visions, but you can't stay dreaming about system 7, that's 20 years ago!...

no problem, Huub - I can take a good dose of sarcasm
but I didn't mention the version because I'm dreaming of something back in time...
it was that version of the OS which established the Mac as the 'superior' system, and exactly that version made ProTools what it is today - in other words: this system made digital audio production possible at all - and btw your beloved Photoshop...
You may not know it, but Adobe only had the image processing algorithms, the GUI would not have been possible without Apple's developement system called MacApp. And what would be Photoshop without it's GUI ?

MacOS 7 was conceptually neat and pretty advanced for it's time - you could have built anything based on it or extend it into whatever direction.

As already mentioned (and as you correctly noticed) it was given up in favour to more gimmicky stuff to fire sales.
Those old Macs simply never died - and people enjoying their flawless workhorses saw few reasons to buy another system.
A fact the company management could not overlook...

Of course OS 8 ran extremely well with most of the Mac applications, but that was in the first place because the original developement system produced extremely robust code.

Starting with OS 8 a growing number of PC applications and peripheral devices was ported to Mac.
This stuff was (originally) designed in a completely different conceptual environment ... and it was responsible for 90% of all system failures and crashes

That was the time when people started to notice that Macs can crash, too - and in fact in some domains they started to replace them by PCs...
------- snip -------

there's no question that OSX is easier to handle out of the box, but then there is a massive concentration in software developement, Apple, Adobe, M$...
for all the others it seems to be getting harder everyday...

at least I know a local supplier of word processing software that runs... well, pretty unstable under some circumstances.
I dunno if it's due to hardware (meanwhile I have 2 MacMinis with trouble, one of them definetely screwing harddisks), OS install/update flaws, the operators, or simply traditional 'bugs'.
If an OSX app writes to half a dozen config files all over the place or if a Windoze app uses the f**ing registry isn't that much of a difference imho

OSX is... muddy water... below the shiny surface

cheers, Tom

Tau · Post by **Tau** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:19 am

to strav100:

yes. it is possible to do what you want, using a Magma chassis with a PCI-E interface. I am using a MacBookPro (laptop) with XP, magma and ExpressCard interface, and it works smoothly. PM me if yo need any assistance.

While we're at it, many new pc laptops do not support XP, unlike the macs; On the other hand, it's not impossible to run OSX on a PC and use Logic if you so desire (it's not legal to do so, but it's possible).

I have also noticed that Apple is now a lot like Microsoft. When I installed Leopard, first thing that happened was that I had to download 700MB of updates... and it still goes on and on, proving that this was indeed a rushed release... Nevertheless, OSX is pretty, stable, and quite "invisible". Boots up in about 20 seconds, and has no comparison to Vista.

Anyway you go about this, you'll always need to reboot between Scope and OSX.

Cheers,

T

Fluxpod · Post by **Fluxpod** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 12:42 pm

stardust wrote:
Tau wrote: On the other hand, it's not impossible to run OSX on a PC and use Logic if you so desire (it's not legal to do so, but it's possible).
Sorry to interfere, but why is it illegal to use OSX on a plain PC ?

Closed source os.

Its stated on the apple website and in the osx user agreement.
It really doesnt make sense to run it on a pc for daw use due to stability issues.

Tau · Post by **Tau** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 12:44 pm

stardust wrote:Sorry to interfere, but why is it illegal to use OSX on a plain PC ?

About a couple of years back, I was looking into this, and for what I understood, Apple didn't license its OS to use with machines other than their own. And because you can't just pick up an OSX DVD and install it on a PC, you'll need a sort of "modified" version, that includes extra drivers and stuff, and is also bootable on a PC.

I believe Apple want to make their OS a selling point for Mac computers - hence it is "illegal" to use it on any other machine. On the other hand, Windows XP and Vista are supported by Apple, and it is def. not illegal to run MS on Apple, since they provide an installer, disk partitioning and boot utility and windows driver set for each machine.

I remember installing an early x86 version of OSX (10.1 I think) on my compaq laptop and it worked well, in spite of not having drivers for most stuff. But it was way cool just to freak out the Mac-snobs around me

I saw expressions on their faces that I'll never forget.

I'm pretty sure you can get a fairly up-to-date version of OSX if you search the web... But I have no idea what will happen in terms of performance, etc...

T

sonicstrav · Post by **sonicstrav** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 12:48 pm

Thanks for the reply Tau

I wasn't aware the Intel Macs has pci-e only slots - it would be too expensive to have an apple mac + magma board.
I wondered if anyone got Logic running well on a PC with a hacked OSX?

Obviously, there's no point in Soniccore producing drivers for OSX now unless they bring out new hardware ( they have got to do it sooner than later or they will be in trouble) - pci is fading away fast now

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:13 pm

OSX ain't firmware, it's a software OS. The thing that comes closest to 'firmware' is the EFI (a type of BIOS). The current method of running OSX on standard PC hardware is to emulate the EFI in software by messing around in the command line after an OSX install, changing a few kext's around etc. All the info is out there, just google 'osx86'. As for reliability - it's still an unknown for the long term. I do know people running Logic really well on such machines, but it's very much a step into the unknown - if you like absolute reliability it's not an advisable rig.

Incidentally I currently know of 2 audio cards that work in PCI slots on Mac Intel hardware (whether in a Magma or a custom hackintosh) - RME and Digidesign HD cards.

pablom · Post by **pablom** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:37 pm

Tau wrote:to strav100:

yes. it is possible to do what you want, using a Magma chassis with a PCI-E interface. I am using a MacBookPro (laptop) with XP, magma and ExpressCard interface, and it works smoothly. PM me if yo need any assistance...
T

Yes, but now a PC is cheaper them Magma. Pentium III with old and good Asus CUSL-2C board for example

I'm using Intel iMac with Logic Pro 8 and RME FF800 connected to PC with Scope Project by ADAT and MIDI. I have all SFP's advantages - instead of ASIO and Sequencer Source/Dest modules I'm using ADAT In/Out and Midi In/Out.

P.S. Hello for all!

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:29 am

welcome Pablo

yes, that the most simple, most straight forward and most reliable setup...
There's a ton of office boxes in excellent shape that never really experienced any serious workload during their 'official' duty - for a few bucks on eBay.
Trash the harddisk, add a kvm-switch and consider the RME device as an improvement to your clock quality.

I never understood the notebook-with-a-Magma point of view.
There are industrial 'luggable' PCs with TFT screens with an even smaller footprint featuring a fully usable PCI bus.
They cost a bit more than their office counterparts, but way less than the crippled external box

cheers, Tom

sonicstrav · Post by **sonicstrav** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:54 am

is there anything cheaper than the RME Fireface 800 that would offer the same functions as Pablo describes?

Fluxpod · Post by **Fluxpod** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:58 am

Echo audiofire 8 is very good!

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:01 pm

strav100 wrote:is there anything cheaper than the RME Fireface 800 that would offer the same functions as Pablo describes?

the main feature regarding linking 2 systems isn't the Firewire box - as Stardust also pointed out it's ADAT.
Any Adat Interface will do, but the Marian is actually pretty expensive compared to an RME 9652 HDSP (3 Adat ports).

The latter is only 166 Euro per port compared to the Marian's 128 Euro, but RME has an onboard DSP mixer, way better performance and comes with a re-clocking ability that (may) save you a studio clock - not to mention their unique tools to check digital signal quality and such stuff.

cheers, Tom

pablom · Post by **pablom** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 7:33 pm

stardust wrote:checkout this
http://www.marian.de/en/products/marc_a
or also
http://www.marian.de/en/products/adcon

IMHO 16ch of ADAT as minimum and one MIDI port is a must. As Astroman pointed - RME has the best clock, drivers and tools (but there's no Digicheck in OSX).

Post by **hubird** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:43 pm

I don't have enought already at 24 ADAT channels, as I hate it to work with mono audio in Cubase and along the line.

What's 12 ASIO channels (plus SPDIF) actually?
HDSP 9652 here, two Midi I/O ports are very welcom and flexible to have.
Auto sinc is perfect, and the Totalmixer is indeed gorgeous, especially when you do life recordings with different submixes for the musicions.

On OSX multiple ASIO client is possible, if the software supports 'channel' selection.
My beloved audio editor Peak does, i.e (Sound Out: CoreAudio).
You can even mix all multiclient asio channels to one (ADAT/SPDIF) output if you want...
Not sure about XP, but Vista will support it I guess.
The documentation is deep and perfect.

It's true, if you don't need those life recording oriented possibilities, and you don't expect sinc and samplerate related problems you can save mony.
RME however covers every situation.

If you don't have the mony now, wait a while and save some.
And the ebay value is high, in case of (btw, I got one by ebay).

moxi · Post by **moxi** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:29 am

i'm waiting for a price quote of this pretty thing:

http://www.zpeng.com/Articles/Products/DAImodules.html

-->that could replace fine an adat plate for up to 32 ins/outs thru firewire from scope to any other daw with firewire.

moxi · Post by **moxi** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:39 am

..and realize that I already get the reply this morning!

the board is 169 euros + 50E for shipping cost

just use the standart AL1401 and AL1402 chipset duo (from WAVEFRONT) to interface this module with your scope ADAT ports if you don't want to tweak directly your scope board

the AL1401 is quiet simple to implement, you just need to add two or three capacitor, and can be powered from the firewire bus easily. they cost only 10 dollar each (one pair for 8 ins/outs).

so with 250E, you can do a nice 32 channels ADAT-firewire interface for your mac.