Quite a strange one, but does anyone have any experience of using a Dante or MADI card on a Hackintosh?!
We currently run quite a strange system: MacPro, running Mainstage, with MADI into the iDR32. Whilst we are quite happy with the iLive and the OSx-based software, we are not so happy with the Mac hardware, and we feel that price/quality, it no longers offers enough.
Our thought is to build our systems into our new flightcases, thus saving cabling and set-up time at gigs, as well as reducing wear and tear on inputs and cables. The logical thing to do is to use rackmount PC units, or even Xserve, but this means moving to Dante, as itās probably not going to work with MADI.
Just wanted to add, in case anyone was wondering, that we purchase ALL our software (musical and otherwise) and this is not a case of acting illegally: just frustration with certain Apple issues and an attempt to find a workaround! Iād happily use 2 year-old Xserves if they took PCI-e cards ā¦
Iām probably going to buy an old-ish Xserve, experiment with that, together with a Dante card first.
The driver behind what weāre doing is set-up times; we think we can reduce our set-up times from the current +/- 3 hours to 30 minutes plus roll-in by reorganising our flightcase solutions; cabling and positioning of 4 / 5 flightcases takes too long, especially when we have an identical set-up every time. The iLive is really a glorified soundcard in our set-up, so it makes sense to āinstallā it, together with our āsample player,ā once and for all.
The Hackintosh world seems to be quite demanding, and leads to āfrustrationā as you correctly point out!
Also donāt overlook the new Mac miniās. Affordable and surprisingly powerful. Especially the quad-core server model. And with a thunderbolt to pcie adapter you can still have some expandability options.
T112/48, MacBook Pro, D-link DIR-815, iPad 1 w/mixpad, Dante card feeding a Mac Mini w/DVS.
CMattE: the āproblemā with the Mac Mini is the lack of twin drives, plus the PCI-E, but I will check it out. The Mac Mini server looks like a good machine, but I wonder how it will handle being āserveredā for real in a rack, with heat etc.
Tuejo: having tried to run Ivory for about a year on Windows platforms, there is no way Iām going back! I love Mainstage, and that means OS-X!
I have bought a 2008 Xserve for evaluation, and it arrives tomorrow morning. Iām going to mod the unit, by putting in stabilising spacers and gel between the motherboard and the housing, as Iāve heard from a great source that the Xserve motherboards can succumb to flex problems.
Yeah the mini isnāt necessarily for everyone, but you can put 2 HDās in them (the server models come with 2), and the newest ones have thunderbolt. Which can be used for PCIe. https://magma.com/thunderbolt.asp However I cannot say how they hold up to the heat and being racked.
Iād also be very interested to know how the xserve works for you. Iāve always thought that would be a good portable solution also.
T112/48, MacBook Pro, D-link DIR-815, iPad 1 w/mixpad, Dante card feeding a Mac Mini w/DVS.
