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Back in OS9

October 8, 2004

The installation Soundtrack is using a total of 40 loudspeakers hidden underneath an industrial steel grid floor. We’re using two Hammerfall sound cards for distributing sound. For some reason this works fine in OS9 using the ASIO driver the cards show up as a singel card with heaps of channels available. In OSX Core Audio they turn up as two individual cards. The consequence is that we didn’t manage to get Max/MSP to access all channels. We didn’t have much time to test it out either and had to use OS9 instead. I didn’t exactly like it. We quickly realised that we had the same MIDI problems that we had using more or less the same equipment two years ago for Norway Remixed. We’re using 24 on/off buttons positioned at the floor for interaction. If there’s a lot of activity going on the MIDI stream into Max suddenly goes silent.

This time I was able to track down the culprit: OMS. Bu opening the OMS Setup Application and testing MIDI the MIDI data suddenly started flowing again. If we hadn’t been so hard pressed on time (and forced to use OS9) I’d much prefer to use the Teabox