Back from the brink of disaster. My Mac Pro just returned this evening from its one week “vacation" at the Apple Store when the Nvidia 8800 video card died for the third time!

Seriously, how many times does this have to happen before they replace it with something that works.

Thankfully I have AppleCare, so I’m not too concerned. I guess if I didn’t have AppleCare to take care of it, I’d have to demand my money back for this lemon card.

A new version of the Unitor8 Preference Pane is now available.

Thanks to the awesome help of panel user Art C., the panel is now known to be working with 8 devices chained together. That means you can now configure 128 MIDI ports! Read More...

A lot of people have be sending me emails asking how to get their Unitor8 or AMT8 working correctly. Just to be clear, the Unitor8 Preference Pane is not a MIDI Driver. If you can’t see your interface in any midi applications, then you have a driver problem.

To help people out as best as I can without having to answer a million emails on it, I’ve written an FAQ about how to install the drivers correctly for each type of Mac. I hope its simple to follow.

I recently discovered a new blog/video blog/forum that I absolutely love.

The Fat Man And Circuit Girl

Awesome stuff! Each week they meet up for a video chat and do hacks, and lots of tinkering, and teach little tidbits of knowledge about analog and digital circuits, pinball machines, and music. It’s much fun to watch.

I’ve watched every episode, and just love it all. Feels like I should be there with them working on all this stuff. People that love DIY exploration, music and games.. my kind of people.

An update on the Unitor 8 Pref Pane: It’s still coming along. I haven’t had time recently to put the finishing touches on, but it’s more than usable currently, so give it a go and let me know if you need something fixed.

Tags: electronics, fatman, Jeri Ellsworth, Music, Fun, DIY

The end is in sight!

I’m still plugging away at the Unitor 8 preference pane. The SMPTE timing panels are very difficult to deal with. There are lots of customs bytes with lot of small pieces of data all packed together, and many values that are only valid when other values are set.

Of course, I want to make sure I don’t make any stupid mistakes and not make any rash decisions that might cost me time later. I’m estimating a day to two to completion, depending on whether I get distracted playing WoW.

Tags: unitor

What’s new:

Version 0.8.5 (current)

• Support for AMT8
• Support for 8 chained Unitor8’s or AMT8 in any order
• Improved support for the actual Unitor8 midi specification

Go check it out!

This may seem like only 3 new items, but this is really a huge deal. You can now configure up to 1024 midi channels!

16 channels per port * 8 ports on each Unitor/AMT * 8 Unitors = 1024 !!!

Tags: unitor

Thanks to a very kind gift from the gods out there, I now have pretty much all the information anyone could ever want about the midi protocol for the Unitor8 and the AMT8.

I’m in the process of updating my code to better support both devices as well as 8 of them chained together!!

The excellent news is that I haven’t found any errors with the protocol as I’ve understood it so far. So it’s pretty safe to use. Even if you have an AMT8 attached. The UI will just be all grayed out while it seeks for a Unitor.

If you have been thinking about getting one of these interfaces on eBay, and you have a newer mac with 10.5 or greater on it, now is the time to buy them. By the time it arrives, you’ll have a working configuration app, even if you buy 8 of them.

Tags: unitor

U8PP is now listed on macmusic.com.

I’ve also submitted it to be listed in the Apple Downloads section, but they say it takes up to 90 days for that to happen if it ever even does! Yowsa.
** Update: now listed on Apple.com Downloads in the Audio section .

Tags: unitor

What’s new:

Version 0.8.0 (current)

• IO patch editing works!!!
• Patches can be named (names are only stored in the preferences).
• 32 customizable IO mappings.
• Copy, paste, and initialize IO patches.
• Displays the Unitor version number when valid input and output are selected.
• Recognizes most settings dumps that are sent from the Unitor.

Go check it out!

Tags: unitor

While I continue to build midi apps that few people will use, I’m building a software architecture behind scenes that will allow me to basically piece large portions together to create new and interesting midi applications. Read More...

Tags: unitor, cocoa

This weekend I’ve made great progress with the Unitor Preference Pane. I added patch configuration. Unfortunately it’s brought my attention to the fact that I have yet to request any information from the Unitor. The latest build initializes all the patches and can copy, paste, customize, and send them to interface, but it never requests what the interface has. So if you have custom setting already stored, they’ll be overwritten. I’m not posting this build because of this. If I was certain that no one cared about their patches that are currently stored in their Unitor, I would release it, but its better if I just fix it first.

Tags: unitor

I should have read my own blog a little better. I never noticed until now that the text for the Unitor and microWAVE XT blog entries was all mixed up (fixed now).

Anyway, tonight I went to the Lake Forest CocoaHeads group meeting to see what a discussion about using Cocoa to write games might be like. It was pretty cool. I wish I could say that my immediate future held doing anything game related with Cocoa, but it definitely does not at the moment.

Tags: cocoa

For weeks I have been working on creating a modern, functional, replacement for the Emagic Unitor8 MkII USB MIDI Interface. To accomplish this I’m reverse engineering the midi system exclusive messages that are sent to the Interface by SoundDiver and Unitor8 Control. Apple has made it clear by now that this is near abandon-ware. While they have amazingly provided Intel based drivers with Logic, the Unitor8 control and SoundDiver applications have languished in such a poor state that I consider them to be nearly unusable.

Follow along here.

Tags: unitor

I’ve written an app that communicates with Waldorf microWAVE XT synthesizers, requesting all the patch names, then placing them on the clipboard or in files so they can be pasted into Apple’s Logic multi environment objects.

Read more about my work on this application here.

Tags: waldorf

Last night I wrote some code to allow a high resolution optical encoder to work on the midibox platform. Here’s a link to my post there.

Tags: Midibox

Today I began taking apart a Tascam MM-RC remote tape control and using the Midibox hardware platform to assume control of all of the functions on the device. You can view the conversion process here on the midibox.org forums.

Tags: Midibox

Under the Studio menu I've added Music that I've worked on. Nothing too special.. just for fun stuff.

Tags: audio

I think this is the third time I've redone my website from scratch. I keep searching for easier and easier ways to deal with the content. This time I've chosen RapidWeaver since iWeb was running way to slow and I didn't really feel like upgrading it to the '08 version.

RW feels like a step up, but I've definitely already noticed that it does have it's bugs. Take this entry for example. I can only type this text in the blog summary panel since the Main Entry panel is bigger than the box it draws in.. ie: the top 5 lines of test are impossible to view since they are chopped off above the text box and no scroll bar is offered. Technically there shouldn't even be a scroll bar until the text goes off the bottom of the panel, but anyway.. Read More...