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Hi everyone,
Quite a strange one, but does anyone have any experience of using a Dante or MADI card on a Hackintosh?!
We currently run quite a strange system: MacPro, running Mainstage, with MADI into the iDR32. Whilst we are quite happy with the iLive and the OSx-based software, we are not so happy with the Mac hardware, and we feel that price/quality, it no longers offers enough.
Our thought is to build our systems into our new flightcases, thus saving cabling and set-up time at gigs, as well as reducing wear and tear on inputs and cables. The logical thing to do is to use rackmount PC units, or even Xserve, but this means moving to Dante, as it’s probably not going to work with MADI.
Has anyone gone down this road at all?
Cheers!
Just wanted to add, in case anyone was wondering, that we purchase ALL our software (musical and otherwise) and this is not a case of acting illegally: just frustration with certain Apple issues and an attempt to find a workaround! I’d happily use 2 year-old Xserves if they took PCI-e cards …
Thanks, Dave.
I’m probably going to buy an old-ish Xserve, experiment with that, together with a Dante card first.
The driver behind what we’re doing is set-up times; we think we can reduce our set-up times from the current +/- 3 hours to 30 minutes plus roll-in by reorganising our flightcase solutions; cabling and positioning of 4 / 5 flightcases takes too long, especially when we have an identical set-up every time. The iLive is really a glorified soundcard in our set-up, so it makes sense to ‘install’ it, together with our ‘sample player,’ once and for all.
The Hackintosh world seems to be quite demanding, and leads to ‘frustration’ as you correctly point out!
Cheers!
Guy
CMattE: the ‘problem’ with the Mac Mini is the lack of twin drives, plus the PCI-E, but I will check it out. The Mac Mini server looks like a good machine, but I wonder how it will handle being ‘servered’ for real in a rack, with heat etc.
Tuejo: having tried to run Ivory for about a year on Windows platforms, there is no way I’m going back! I love Mainstage, and that means OS-X!
I have bought a 2008 Xserve for evaluation, and it arrives tomorrow morning. I’m going to mod the unit, by putting in stabilising spacers and gel between the motherboard and the housing, as I’ve heard from a great source that the Xserve motherboards can succumb to flex problems.
Thanks guys … I will post after testing.
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