Hi Greg,
Greg Kearney wrote:
On Feb 26, 2007, at 16:19 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
Simply put, can I use normal PCI cards, not PCI Express cards, with
any of the current and future Intel Macs on offer?
I've got two PCI cards I wouldn't want to part with, no matter
whether my next OS will be Windows Vista, some flavor of Linux or
OS X. One is my 10 in 10 out soundcard, the TerraTec EWS88 MT.
Modern Macs have very complete sound support so you will not need a
sound card.
Hmm I'm sceptical about that. My PCI card can do 24 bit and 96 kHz with
actually decent quality and has good DAcs in it. ANother thing it has is 5
stereo pairs for input and output which show up as five different sound
cards, at least in Windows. No internal MAc card is going to compete with
that. The other thing is, once again, latency. CAn the internal MAc sound
card use soft synths at a latency that's comparable to good ASIO audio cards
on the PC stuff like 5 ms?
The other PCI card is the HardSoftware HardSID, which is basically
the C64 SID chip on a PCI card. I think they have OS X drivers so I
could at least play SID files with the card and use it in
emulators <snip>
, although the MIDI environment in it is Windows-only.
I was able to find a program call SIDPLAY for Mac that is voiceover
compatible.
Yes, but that's software emulation. I have the real hardware on the card and
it sounds quite different. Granted I don't listen to SID music all they, but
would still like to be able to use the hardware I've purchased over the
years.
Thanks for your help, though.
I still don't see how Apple has ditched PCI cards so quickly. I mean that
would be almost like saying: we don't support CDs any more as by now all
people will store their data on DVDs in stead, as it is more modern. I mean
there are heaps of PCI devices produced in the last five years, for example.
I've yet to hear about any PCI express sound cards, too, though Firewire and
USB are getting more common.
Another analogy is the lack of a floppy drive. I recall when that Mac friend
of mine used to suffer from the lack of floppy support for data transfer.
ALthough I feel like I can say good bye to floppies now, it took me about
five years to reach that status. ONly when USb mmemory sticks were
mainstream and I had no need to boot to DOS to format my hard drives, could
I really get rid of floppies on the PC. Mind you this is just an analogy,
though, and not a very good one at that, either, <grinb>.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
