Is it really this complicated? Or is there some specific order in which I should do things so I wouldn't have to manually force this recognition? This feels like a very cumbersome thing to do every single time. Now I had to go to Utilities > Audio Midi Setup, and Rescan for MIDI devices. On the first time I absolutely couldn't figure out what the logic was to getting the keyboard to be accepted as an input device, I just did all sorts of random stuff When I use the M-Audio UNO, a simple MIDI to USB device to play into GB, it simply recognizes it immediately and hello, you're ready to play. Yet it doesn't, GB's settings still say "0 MIDI input devices available". I just feel like, when I plug it in and it gets powered, and GB then asks me if I want to use Firebox, the keyboard should become available as a MIDI input device. My keyboard doesn't have an on/off button and under normal circumstances it's bus-powered, but since with the iMac G4 you can't rely on it to power such devices, I power the keyboard from its USB port to a regular plug in the wall, and then use a MIDI cable into the Firebox, to transmit the actual messages. Like on the first time, it seemed like a complete mystery to me, what the order of setting things up should be. The other issue is the workflow in terms of getting started. Is the interference noise there because of the Firewire connection itself, or could it be because the vicinity of the actual Firebox device? Because (in hindsight), a 30cm Firewire cable is very short, it's stiff and won't really even allow a nice placement of the device. I didn't test if it would get transferred to (noise cancelling) headphones too but I sure would want to cancel out that noise somehow. I could not imagine working while hearing that noise. However, it doesn't come without problems: Firstly, the Firebox causes a lot of interference just by being plugged in The computer is making a kind of screeching noise, and if you have the ApplePro speakers plugged in like I do, they will further amplify the sound by playing it back from the speakers as well. There's exactly two buffer sizes in that GB: one "optimized for minimal lag when playing live" and one "optimized for playback without dropouts".Īctually now that I powered up the machine, I am getting the keyboard to play without lag! I don't know why. Now it just seems so confusing that this iMac can't even manage a very simple project at its early stages, and the only envelope data is the sustain pedal, if anything. Sure, the old iMacs I had would struggle to play back complex projects with too many tracks in them but that was a very understandable issue that could be managed with some workarounds. On my main computer, I've always just taken MIDI directly from a controller to the computer's USB port and it's been fine. It feels insane to come to think about an audio interface as late as now, because I started dabbling with music when I got my first personal Mac that was a G5, and that iMac nor any of my Macs that followed ever required an external audio interface in order to simply get some audio and MIDI in. My hunch here is that I might need an external Firewire audio interface (the USB ports assumedly being too slow), but is that actually the case, and what does it do in terms of MIDI, actually? So back in the day, how did people actually manage do any music stuff on the iMac G4? Surely it was powerful enough for the basic stuff? I'm aware of the buffer size setting but it doesn't seem to do enough in this case. The issue is that even if I have a new or otherwise very minimal project in GarageBand and no third-party plug-ins installed, when I try to record in some MIDI data, the latency is so great that even if I'd actually played it on the beat, the resulting recorded MIDI clip will have the notes all over the place and out of time. I probably will eventually, but somehow it feels like it's not the culprit, or that it's not the only culprit to the issue. I put an SSD into the iMac recently, but haven't updated the RAM from the 1GB it has now. I'd like to occasionally use my G4 for musical drafting.
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