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A comment on macOS Catalina. Parent comment

Re:macOS Catalina by AlanYx on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:01PM (#21186440)
You have a point, but another thing to note is that the quality of Apple’s developer docs for audio drivers and CoreAudio has been decreasing. Some major behaviours/quirks of new frameworks like AVAudioEngine on OS X are not documented at all. It’s a lot harder to chase the target than it used to be. This is IMHO one of the likely reasons that MOTU chose to implement as much as possible as an on-device web interface on their newer gear.
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Re:macOS Catalina by michaelrmmiller on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:48AM (#21188862)
As a former MOTU engineer who worked on the software side of the new interfaces, the built-in web server was really about cross-device and multi-user access, not avoiding CoreAudio. We still had to write CoreAudio server plug-ins for Thunderbolt and proxy the web server through the driver as well.

I hear they are planning to update their 32-bit drivers for the older MIDI and audio interfaces with the exception of the PCIe devices. (There are no existing Macs that can run Catalina and the old PCIe interfaces with the exception of the new Mac Pros, but there will be no driver so...)

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Re:macOS Catalina by AlanYx on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @09:03AM (#21191784)
MOTU just released a statement indicating that they’re only working on new drivers for the hybrid and newer devices. Firewire gear like the popular 828mk3 classic aren’t getting drivers.
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Re:macOS Catalina by dkonofalski on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:28PM (#21186672)
>new frameworks like AVAudioEngine on OS X

AVAudioEngine is not a new framework on macOS. It was first available on macOS Yosemite which was in beta in 2013 and released in 2014. Developers have had 6+ years to develop and test using these frameworks.

This literally just boils down to developers complaining that Apple isn't further letting them procrastinate.

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Re:macOS Catalina by AlanYx on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:03PM (#21187329)
That illustrates the problem though... It’s not a new framework, but the documentation is still poor, and important limitations of it on OS X are not documented at all, years later. (I picked this example specifically because it was a subject of traffic on the CoreAudio mailing list last month.)

Apple expects developers to adopt new technologies, but often never gets around to documenting them well enough to drive adoption. It’s been a real issue for low level audio work on the platform.

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