Did Steve break my audio?

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My apologies for a quick deviation from the photography theme, but here’s something I have to get off my chest.

Huh?! Wot??! Yesterday everything worked just fine, my trusty little Alesis iO|2 USB audio interface did a great job when recording Skype calls (something I do a lot as a podcaster) and today when I started to prep for another recording, it all of a sudden wouldn’t play back the other party’s sound to me. A quick look into the sound preferences showed me that the iO|2 was available as an output, but not as an input anymore. Reboot didn’t help either. Bummer.
Well, luckily I won’t let something like that stop me. Dug through my recording equipment for one of the Presonus Firepods, a Firewire interface that I normally use for mobile multi-track recording of live bands, and hooked that one up instead. Now the Firepod will record my voice, but it won’t play back the other side. Bummer 2.0.

While thinking about what on earth I changed in my setup to break things that bad, it dawned on me.. just a few hours ago, I had done the Mac OS X 10.4.10 update. Oh well.. I should probably have listened to the guys on Macbreak when they said one should wait for a week or two before jumping on an OSX update.
In the meanwhile, I’ll use two audio interfaces, one on Firewire for recording and one on USB for playback… and if things get too weird, I’ll revert to my (not yet updated) iMac for recording.

  • http://photos.saers.com Nik

    Not noticed anything wrong myself with my M-Audio and Zoom, but 10.4.9 wasn’t a nicely behaving update. I thought Apple had got it out of their system by now. ;-)

  • Steve

    I also had the exact same problem: I updated my MacBook Pro to OS X 10.4.10, and it stopped recognizing my Alesis io|2 as an input device. I filed bug reports with Apple and Alesis, and got a reply from Alesis. I restored from a backup I took prior to updating to 10.4.10, and am able to use the io|2. Hopefully they (either Apple or Alesis) will have a fix soon…

  • haleOnEarth

    If you’re experiencing audio problems after updating to OS X 10.4.10 you’re not alone. The complaints are growing quickly and here are some of the culprits mentioned:

    “Confirmed that replacing /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext with the version from 10.4.9 kills snap/crackle/pop. If you have a backup of it from 10.4.9, just copy it over, repair permissions and restart. This fixes popping issue due to overagressive power management in 10.4.10. It also fixes the increased volume level.”
    http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/downdate/os-10410-snap-crackle-pop-271672.php

    “One of the changes in 10.4.10 is a revamped FWAudio.kext, with higher thread priority. Unfortunately, this is causing issues with some FireWire based audio interface units, particularly those relying on Apple’s own CoreAudio. There is a small but growing number of reports of audio I/O devices such as the M-Audio Fire, failing to be recognised by the OS, even after maintenance.”
    http://forums.mactalk.com.au/showthread.php?t=32838&page=2

    Updates have their hitches, but with the Mac as a creative audio/visual hub coupled with the intended kernel extension improvements, this is an odd one for Apple engineers.