Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => macOS => Topic started by: xyle_one on 18 October 2002, 07:30
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i purchased this card a while ago, but to my surprise, there are no drivers for it, and creative isnt supporting it. Brian Sounder of creative is (i guess) working on a driver independently from creative for osX. Does anyone have any info on this, or should i just suck it up, and try to sell/trade the card. If i am screwed, what would be a good card to get (one that is supported and works). thanks in advance.
ecsyle-one
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What Mac Model? Why are you getting a sound card? All Macs that have PCI have built in sound.
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its a 800mhz g4, the only sound port on it is a headphone jack at the top of the case. My speakers are 5 channel, so i figured id get the soundblaster live mac card. last time i ever buy something without researching.
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no sound card will have Mac drivers.
unless you wanna fork over $500US+ for a multichannel recording/sequencing card.
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so im shit out of luck. that sucks. Next time, i will deffinetely educate myself before i run out and buy something. I am still relatively new to this mac thing, so i dont know whats up yet. shitty twice.
thanks for the heads up Bob's.
ecsyle one
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I know it's not much good right now, but if you want a good sound system, I heard someone is developing Darwin drivers for the Sound Blaster Extigty.
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quote:
no sound card will have Mac drivers.
That's interesting that you say that, since every time I go into Comp USA I always see Soundblaster Live cards that were made for the Mac and contain Mac drivers. Plus he also mentioned that he got the Soundblaster Live Mac specific card.
I think the actual problem is that either the card you got was defective, or you have to disable the on-board Mac sound in some way. My experience with Macs is rather low, so I don't know this for certain. But I wouldn't say you're SOL yet. If the card is specifically made for a Mac, it should work with a Mac.
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There really are no drivers for it in osX. There are for classic, but i understand that it is very buggy and doesnt do the card justice. The card was made for the mac, but creative neglected to write a driver for it. So i am SOL. :( (http://redface.gif) :mad:
ecsyle one
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I have an SB live which works great under Linux, surely Mac OS X has just as good of hardware support as Linux?
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You will be happy to know that there are OSX drivers being developed. The page I'm linking to is the OSX SBLive! driver developers page to keep people updated on the status of the drivers and I'm sure that when they are finished there will be a download link for them there.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/audio/soundblaster_os_x_drivers.html (http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/audio/soundblaster_os_x_drivers.html)
[ October 20, 2002: Message edited by: Zombie9920 ]
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quote:
Originally posted by Windows XP User #5225982375:
I have an SB live which works great under Linux, surely Mac OS X has just as good of hardware support as Linux?
The last 2 posts of your's (that i seen) both said good things about Linux have a fell in a parralel dimension (he will be Red-Hat 8.0 User #452353452345)
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Thanks zombie, i ran into that page in my desperate search for a driver, the only thing is i can not find the beta to download, or any new info on its development.
I might just wait until the driver is released, but i have no patience, and i have had this card for far too long as it is. I believe osX has great hardware support, but without the driver from creative, how can osx support it? I suppose apple could have developed it own their own, but it probably wasnt a priority. i will probably go and blow some more money on a new card. :(
ecsyle_one
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I don't get it? With Mac's being so big in the audio and recording industry how come there has never been such a big market for sound cards on the platform?
I suppose PC's have had alot of sound cards and junk because they were never a standard pice of hardware till recently. People had to go out of their way to get sound, where as Mac's have sound hardware built right in.
This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Personaly, I don't miss having a sound card, tho it would be nice to have the option.
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Well, the audio you speak of is usually high-end stuff.
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quote:
Originally posted by MacUser3of5:
Well, the audio you speak of is usually high-end stuff.
Yep. A Pro Tools PCI card set-up is thousands of dollars.
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I do multitrack audio recording once in a while, and since I use a PC (can't afford a Mac right now), I can tell you that it's better to use a separate PCI sound card for audio recording than it is to use the onboard audio, because PCI cards don't use nearly as much CPU power as the audio on board (at least that's how I understand it). It doesn't necessarily even have to be a thousand dollar multi-channel sound card, a simple Soundblaster card will do as well. (I use a an SB 16 PCI myself)
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quote:
Originally posted by emh:
I do multitrack audio recording once in a while, and since I use a PC (can't afford a Mac right now), I can tell you that it's better to use a separate PCI sound card for audio recording than it is to use the onboard audio, because PCI cards don't use nearly as much CPU power as the audio on board (at least that's how I understand it). It doesn't necessarily even have to be a thousand dollar multi-channel sound card, a simple Soundblaster card will do as well. (I use a an SB 16 PCI myself)
You are partially correct. The SB Live! and SB Audigy cards have an Audio Processing Unit(APU) kind of like how GeForce/Radeons have a GPU(Graphics Processing Unit). The processing unit allows the card to do most of/all of the work that the CPU would have to do if you have a card without a processing unit. The SB Live!(with the emu10k1 APU) can give your systems' gaming performance an increase of up to 17% and the Audigy(with the emu10k2 APU) can give up to a 25% increase in gaming performance(the Audigy APU does more work in the processing unit than the Live! did) simply because the sound isn't using up precious CPU cycles.
A sound card with an APU also makes it where you can listen to any digital audio on your computer without any of your CPU cycles being used up(your system will perform better while playing like an MP3 w/an APU than it would without one). Of course with a fast system playing digital Audio isn't a big deal no matter what card(I tried my Audigy in an old Pentium 133mhz box I have laying around and I could tell a big difference in it's performance while playing digital audio..a.k.a it didn't slow down because of the music..in my Athlon, PIII and P4 boxes I can't tell a difference though ;P).
When it comes to professional audio work, a card with an APU and a low latency can make a huge difference in how long it takes to do stuff like encoding audio(up to like a 75% increase of performance compared to a soundcard without an APU..WOW!).
Onboard Audio is worse than a soundcard without an APU because your CPU is your soundcard(your CPU is emulating a soundcard). Using onboard audio causes your system to take a big hit in overall system performance when doing anything audio related(playing games, listening to music, etc.).
Your SB16 PCI card doesn't have an APU so you don't benefit from the advantages of an APU..but you are definatley better off with that SB16 PCI than you are with onboard Audio.
BTW, I bet you are wondering what I meant by you were partially correct, huh? Well, there are some PCI sound cards that are nothing more than an Audio Codec(like onboard Audio) and your CPU emulates a sound card and the card in the PCI slot is nothing more than a way to plug in speakers to the CPU emulated sound.
[ October 21, 2002: Message edited by: Zombie9920 ]