We’ve got a slew of compatibility updates today for would-be Mac OS X 10.4 upgraders, including official upgrade advice from Native Instruments. As always, watch our Tiger Special Report for complete coverage (and a compatibility rundown based on all we know).
Native Instruments: NI has a special page explaining 10.4 support and upgrading info. Updates are needed for Traktor DJ, Traktor FS, and Komplete, but otherwise NI products are compatibile — with one important exception. Final Scratch 1.x won’t work, meaning you’ll be forced to upgrade to v2 if you want Tiger compatibility.
Upgrading Tips: NI recommends that you choose the “Upgrade” option over a clean install (“Archive and Install” or “Erase Installation”) in order to maintain your existing software authorizations. This may be true of other vendors, as well. Of course, if you don’t mind re-authorizing and want the benefits of a clean install, go for it. I’ve found clean installs in the past have often yielded vast performance gains by clearing out various forms of system crud.
Digidesign: Reinel Adajar, Digi’s terrific PR specialist, tells us that readers should check Digidesign’s compatibility page for the latest updates on system compatibility. (Currently, Tiger is unsupported, but that’s the page to check for the most up-to-date info. Note, that’s Digi only, not M-Audio products which are still maintained on the M-Audio site.)
M-Audio Compatibility Statement: Official word from M-Audio is now on their support website (thanks to CDM contributor Pierce Case for the tip!); basically it says, well, drivers are coming soon. “We are currently verifying compatibility of our hardware with Apple’s new Tiger operating system. No device manufacturer can predict the compatibility of their hardware with a new OS until the final version has been released. We value your time and user experience, and want to ensure that our Tiger drivers are as robust as possible before providing them for download. We thank you for your patience while we verify these drivers, and we will post them shortly.”
M-Audio Reader Reports: Meanwhile, CDM readers continue to work with M-Audio hardware running the current drivers, and some of you are having pretty good luck! I’ve gotten several readers working with the popular M-Audio FireWire 410 hardware successfully. Mark even tells us his Audiophile 2496, which was unstable under 10.3, works much better under Tiger! (Mark says he’s running the Delta_OSX_2.0.1 driver with Logic 7.1 on a 733 (upgraded to 1.2 ghz) G4 QuickSilver Mac. He’s having some trouble with fader response on the Delta Control Panel, though it’s otherwise working.)
Keep those reports coming. And thanks to everyone who’s written to point out aggregation features and AU Lab. Rather than run a sketchy report, I’ll run a detailed look with screenshots once I have Tiger working later this week.
CDM Widget: Anyone interested in helping me work on a CDM widget for Dashboard? (And, of course, a QuartzComposer screensaver with RSS feeds from all our favorite music sites — I can’t wait to see jaw harp stories running across my screen!)