My Unisyn Machine (MacMini + Snow Leopard) unreliable MIDI communication

[James Steele]

Well, I had been trying to set up a Mac Mini to run Snow Leopard and Unisyn 2.11.

I got it all up and running only to find that sysex communication is unreliable. When I was doing this with my old iBook G4 it was solid as a rock. With the 2009 (Intel) Mac Mini, often times Unisyn does nothing when I attempt to "Get" patch data from a device. When it *does* do something I occasionally have data errors.

I'm worried that what is going on here is that Unisyn running in Rosetta is not quite working well enough to ensure reliable sysex transmission/reception. As I said, the iBook G4 (which had an actual PowerPC processor) was solid. I had been connected to a USB switch that let me choose whether my MIDI Express XT was connected to my Mac Studio or to the Unisyn machine (previously my iBook G4). I'm going to try bypassing the switch and make a direct connection to the MIDI Express XT but I don't hold out much hope.

My gut is saying that Unisyn running under Rosetta just can't quite cut it. Which is kind of a bummer as I wasted some money on the Mac Mini. I may have to go looking for another PowerPC mac like another iBook G4 or maybe a G4 Cube if I can find one and it can run Snow Leopard. I do NOT want to waste a tower just to run UniSyn although I do have one if I must. Might even still have a G5 in storage!

[stubbsonic]

I'm running Snow Leopard successfully on a 2008 MacBook (Model 4,1 -- 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) that wasn't very expensive to acquire (might have been luck, on that front). It took some patience and resourcefulness to get everything working. I feel lucky we can still get new batteries for those old machines.

If you happen to have other MIDI i/o available, you could try that. Or perhaps swap out your MIDI cables?

Long ago, I had been trying to make an M-Audio Uno work as a MIDI i/o, but it was an accursed object. I think it had lots of noise and/or jibber on the data line, so it had lots of dropped notes. Apparently this was common with that i/o.

[James Steele]

I’m going to try a different cable and bypassing the USB switch. The problem is using a different interface doesn’t solve my problem the whole elegant solution before this happened and I had to switch machines, was that I had a remote controlled USB switch and I could redirect The mini interface from the Mac studio to the Unisyn machine. In other words I could sequence on my Mac studio, then if I wanted to do something with the attached modules I could switch over to the other machine that was running Unisyn, then switch back. I can’t see an elegant way to do this if I had a different MIDI interface on the Unisyn machine.

[mikehalloran]

Based on my experience, a G4 cannot run Snow Leopard. That said, there's 90 pages here that suggest it might be possible if you mess with things enough.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sn ... s.2232031/

Since you now have a FW optical that can boot your G4, I'd try that first. Its problems might be as simple as a bad drive or battery.

[James Steele]

Hmmmmm I’m pretty sure my iBook G4 was running Snow Leopard. It’s very much dead. Doesn’t try to read the drive. No light comes on.

[mothra]

Hmmmmm I’m pretty sure my iBook G4 was running Snow Leopard. It’s very much dead. Doesn’t try to read the drive. No light comes on.

Snow Leopard was originally both PPC and Intel (Apple thought about giving the G5 users a bone) but it was killed long before release. Snow Leopard is the first Intel only OS X.

[James Steele]

Weird. I was almost certain. Must have been whatever was prior to that I guess.