Our July 2 article on ” Mac OS X and Music ” was well received and garnered lots of questions and feedback. We also received a few questions from Mac OS X using music fans that we will attempt to answer in this article.
Question: If apple incorporates MIDI into Mac OS X, does that mean that you can use MIDI plug and play?
Answer: Don’t bet on plug and play; there’ll probably be some setup, as there is now with OMS. But the point is that you won’t need an extension to allow the gear’s driver recognition — it’ll be inherent in the system.
Question: If you have a USB-MIDI device (like the Tascam or a MOTU device) can you just plug it in and get the appropriate signals to the appropriate software?
Answer: See the answer to the previous question. This is probably a similar situation, but it should be fairly painless.
Question: If Mac OS X has MIDI implemented in it, does that mean that you can use MIDI devices to control non-MIDI software? For example, the US-428 has a controller interface that sends MID signals. Could this interface be used in something like Premiere or even in Photoshop? Or would the program still have to be written to interpret the signals properly?
Answer: It should work if the application is using the Core Audio System for audio. It’s not clear how this might work in Photoshop.
Question: Does Apple’s audio implementation in Mac OS X mean that you would no longer need ASIO drivers to get really low latency?
Answer: OS X will provide sufficient low latency, but there will probably be applications or plug-ins that won’t be re-written immediately, and they may require ASIO.