Ask HN: USB audio interface driver (macOS)

Hey HN,

I don't expect to find a solution here, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts.

My wife is a musician and she is very nostalgic about the sound she got when recording with a ~20 year old audio interface (the original M-Box from Digidesign/ProTools, now AVID).

Anyways, some years ago there ceased being an official driver for this and we bought a 3rd party generic USB driver from usb-audio.com , and this worked on OSX intel mac.

Well, we have Apple Silicon macs and to my dismay I have not been able to find any way to get this device working.

My question is - what are the challenges involved in having USB device support persist through mac OS versions? It seems crazy to me that something as basic as an audio interface can become a paperweight, especially considering it's not using some strange connectivity interface, it's freakin USB.

cheers -kevin

2 comments

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t-3 2y ago ↗

I don't have any answers to your questions, but have you checked the dmesg output when you plug it in? That should tell you something about how the system is seeing the device and what drivers are being loaded.

locusofself 2y ago ↗

I see the name of the device being printed in the log and what appears to be some attempt at initialization. No obvious failure messages. Curiously, I see references to the device appear in "wifi.log" also.

The old 3rd party driver stopped supporting the driver when macOS dropped "kernel extensions" or something like that, seems as though they have a totally new paradigm for drivers then they did in OSX 10.x