July 11, 2007 8:35 AM PDT

Mac OS X 10.4.10 Special Report: FireWire audio interface issues -- fixes

by CNET staff

Update: Apple has officially endorsed this solution in a recent Knowledge Base article. [Added July 11, 2007.]

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Mac OS X 10.4.10 breaks some FireWire audio interfaces, including the Behringer FCA-202 and Mackie Onyx Satellite. The cause of this problem appears to be Apple's upgrade of the FireWire Audio driver (FWAudio driver) from version 2.0.1 to version 2.1.

Mackie, the manufacturer of some affected FireWire interfaces, has now posted a fix that involves reverting to FWAudio driver 2.0.1, included with Apple's FireWire SDK 24. Instructions are as follows:

Download the "FireWire SDK 24 for Mac OS X" from http://developer.apple.com/sdk/ (this will require a free account to login).
Double-click on the downloaded file "firewiresdk24. dmg" to mount the image.
From the mounted image "Firewire SDK 24", doubleclick on "FireWireSDK23.pkg" to launch the SDK installer and follow the on-screen instructions.
Once installed, browse to "Macintosh HD:Developer: FireWireSDK23:FireWireComponents:FireWireAudio 2.0.1." Double-click on "AppleFWAudio-2.0.1fc1-e8.pkg" to launch the installer. Follow the on-screen instructions, which will require a reboot.
Once the computer has rebooted, you can verify the update by viewing the "AppleFWAudio" extension in "System Profiler."
Select the Apple icon in the top left-hand corner of your screen, then select "About this Mac" and click the "More Info" button.
Under the "Software" section in the menu tree on the left-hand side, select "Extensions" (it may take a minute or two to update the extensions list).
When the extensions list has updated, you can view the version of "AppleFWAudio" which should be 2.0.1.

You may need to restart after applying this fix in order to get your FireWire audio interface working.

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