Y-my-R

I got Sounddiver working with my Unitor 8 on a MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro, yesterday (on Sonoma 14.2.1) It works via "Crossover" (which is based on Wine, I think, but with a much easier to use GUI), and by setting it to emulate the Windows 2000 commands. I also set SoundDiver to release the MIDI driver in the background... not sure, but I think it acted a bit weird, before that. When scanning for the Unitor 8, it couldn't be found, btw... but this didn't seem to matter, b/c SoundDiver saw the MIDI ports from the Unitor, anyway. (Just listing Port 1 through Port 8, without saying what interface this belongs to). So, I only added my synths directly via SoundDiver, without adding the Unitor 8 module to it. It just worked that way. I only have a couple of external synths. Some were found when scanning, some I had to add manually, and then set the MIDI in/out ports in SoundDiver, and they were found and I could request their settings and edit them. I did have some trouble when scanning some of the synths, where SoundDiver kept crashing when trying to, such as when trying to scan anything from the "Performance" bank of a Yamaha EX5R. After messing around with transmission delays etc. and making sure the EX5R had that bank active, it worked, and I was able to request and edit the presets. My Yamaha CS2x also crashed SoundDiver when trying to scan, when it was NOT set to "Multi" mode. That's b/c the SD module for the CS2x only supports the XG bank, but not the Performance banks. Apparently, the right bank has to be active for this to work (I think it was the same way back in the day... hard to remember after 20 years, though, haha). My Alesis QSR was detected without a hitch - was scanned without problems and worked immediately. I also scanned a Roland TD10-Expanded - this one also required some tweaks... but probably because that's not connected to the Unitor, but slaved into the external MIDI ports of a Roland TD-30 module (that provides it's own MIDI port to the computer via USB). But even that worked, after tweaking the transmission buffers and delay settings, etc. I have to wire them up for MIDI, but also have an Alesis MidiVerb4 and Roland DEP-5, that I was able to add, but couldn't try them yet (MIDI not connected, and way things are set up in my racks, that's a bit of a project). I don't expect "Auto-Link" to work with Logic, and haven't tried it yet (also b/c I've been using Studio One for the last 5 years or so... but Logic before that since version 2). I'll try, eventually. Before going for Crossover, I unsuccessfully tried different Virtual Machine apps, such as UTM (a GUI and templates for QEMU) and VirtualBox with Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows 11 - both these VM apps gave errors when trying to switch the USB port for the Unitor to the VM, regardless of the installed OS. Looks like MacOS wouldn't release the Unitor driver, so the VM couldn't get to it. SoundDiver ran on all these old Windows versions, though. It was just the MIDI interface (Unitor) that didn't work, because it either couldn't be 'handed through' to the guest OS, or there was no driver that works in that OS (e.g. Win11). I also tried UTM with MacOS 9... but OS9 only has USB1.1 implementation, and my Mac has USB3... there's no driver, so it couldn't find the Unitor. It I then also tried Parallels (and like an idiot, paid for the upgrade before trying it... for general stuff UTM IMO works BETTER than Parallels), and that gave a message when trying to install a Windows version for which a Unitor 8 driver existed (e.g. Win98/Win2k), that the CPU architecture is not supported, and that only Operating Systems with ARM64 (Apple Silicon) CPU architectures can be run in Parallels - and in support forums, claimed it's the Mac's fault, not Parallels - well, UTM and VirtualBox can both run different processor architectures... so, no Parallels... its YOUR fault that you can't emulate different CPU architectures. Other FREE(!!) VM apps can do that quite well. And when it comes to Windows, the only version that supports the ARM64 architecture, is Win11 (well, Win10 also, if you can find an installer image that still has ARM64 support in it... looks like they removed that in newer versions). All this won't work, though, since there's no 64-bit driver for the Unitor, and Windows 11 will not recognize the old existing 32-bit driver for Windows for the Unitor. So, unless there'll be new Windows 64-bit driver released, too, that's going to be a dead end. In the end, "Crossover" (aka "Wine") worked, because this is not a Virtual Machine, but it only emulates the environment the PC application itself needs and translates the OS and driver calls from that environment (I used Win2k, b/c that's the last officially supported Windows OS with SoundDiver 3), to the native MacOS/Apple-Silicon environment. I don't really expect this to work 100% stable at all times, but I haven't really used my external synths much for MANY years, since I'm totally unwilling to dig for all the needed parameters from tiny displays and "unique" organizations of menus and knobs on the front panel. Even if I can just get in there, "design" a sound and save often, and get out again, and have my sound, this is still a HUGE improvement, and basically gives me my synths back. I hope this helps others find a way to get SoundDiver back with their Unitor/AMT on an M1/M2/M3 Mac 🙂

I couldn't find anything on this topic... my apologies if I ask something that has long been covered. Is there a way to customize the mapping of an actual Mackie Control Universal, running either in MCU or HUI mode? Any time I try to change the mapping of a button to something else, it will not control what I want it to control and instead, that button just stops working (even if I delete all equal assignments in all zones first, that do what I want to map this to). The same thing works fine if I use some generic MIDI controller, but I can't seem to customize the buttons (etc.) on an MCU. This makes me suspect that Logic doesn't allow you to modify the predetermined layout of an MCU or MCU in HUI mode. Can this be? What this really is about, is that the Metering on the MCU when connecting via the MCU protocol is really buggy. Sluggish, and gets stuck when switching the faders between different track types (e.g. audio tracks or aux/buss tracks), or moving around between banks with the meters active, etc. The HUI protocol doesn't have that problem, so I thought I'd run the MCU in HUI mode, and manually re-map everything to the MCU layout, which I like a lot better (there are a lot of things the HUI layout just doesn't do). That the meters are sluggish is not quite as noticeable on an actual MCU (I own one and 2 extenders), but on a different controller in MCU mode with better metering (in my case, a Mackie d8b with a probox connected, 24 LEDs per channel) it becomes pretty obvious that the meters are excessively sluggish. And the meters work just fine when using the d8b/probox in MCU mode with other DAWs (tried Tracktion, Harrison MixBus, and on a PC also Samplitude), so it seems to be Logic. Is remapping the MCU or HUI button layout not possible, or am I just doing it wrong every single time I try?