macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support

[grrrz]

You can install a PCIe firewire card in a Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

Or in a thunderbolt enclosure, anyway fw adapter uses pcie, not usb, as fw can't work through usb

 

[grrrz]

Honestly I don’t believe Apple silicon even had sections that recognise FireWire or had channels reserved for such a legacy port. But besides that, unless the adaptor translates signal in a way that Mac would see the device as a USB one, then it should be ok. Otherwise, if macOS is still needed to recognise that device as a “FireWire” device, things can get tricky. Think of it as VGA to HDMI adapter: analog signal translated to digital one.

With all that being said, I’m just brainstorming and I’m not well versed into this field. So I’m happy to be corrected if what I think is totally wrong and void of reality.

No, firewire needs a specific system driver to work, and it can't go through usb. It's a thunderbolt device (so pcie basically). This driver has been present forever until sequoia. There's a firewire tab in the system report dedicated to it.

 

[grrrz]

FireWire-to-USB cables are available and work well, from own experience with older music equipment.

Again, no, that's not a thing, read my previous comments.

 

[grrrz]

Help an ignorant person to understand. I'm assuming you access those firewire devices via a thunderbolt or usb adapter? When doing so, does the Mac rely on firewire drivers or strictly the thunderbolt or usb drivers?

It relies on a firewire driver. Like when you plug a pcie card in your pc with a fw port it will have a generic driver for it. There's no usb involved and there can never be, it's like wanting a pcie card over usb.

 

[grrrz]

Don't upgrade then. You've got like 2-3 years from today to sort out your migration plan.

'Migration plan' lol, yeah it's just dumping 1000 bucks in new hardware for nothing

 

[grrrz]

If you're fine with producing audio with a pretty old firewire device, you can probably also do perfectly fine with an OS and a Mac that's older than 2025.
If anybody had firewire devices AND bought a Mac recently to use them and can't upgrade the OS, that's kinda bad but I don't think it's a very common scenario. Most times I see people with a lot of old audio gear, they also have a G5 PowerMac or something similar because they never felt the need to upgrade.

We need decently fast computers to work but it has nothing to do with the functionality of a sound interface which provides inputs and outputs whether it's from 2006 or 2025.

 

[grrrz]

Even modern best in class interfaces ($2000+) use USB 2.0, as the bandwidth is more than what is necessary even for 24/768kHz audio, which is FAR more than most studios are using.

This whole thing would make me think twice about buying any piece of equipment that uses Thunderbolt, though. Same thing, would be so easy for someone to simply disable support many years down the line. USB isn’t going anywhere though.

Exactly. Thunderbolt already went through a complete overhaul when going from 2 to 3.

 

[grrrz]

So I’m also working, how difficult would it be for someone to write third party drivers for FireWire? Let’s say, someone made a DV importer app that contains a driver specifically for the FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter rather than relying on native FireWire support.

The driver exist, it's a kext file, the question is how would you plug it back to the system and given apple security policy it seems like quite a nightmare to achieve.

 

[840quadra]

As a collector, using a new Mac for my old iPods usually is more problematic than it is good so just something I avoid.

FireWire devices, I only use on a Mac that has it natively, so the newest device I connect my 3rd gen iPod to is my 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro, or, my Mac Pro 5,1. Nothing newer with adapters as Apple Music seems to hate old iPods.

 

[grrrz]

I kept my MOTU 828mkII FW audio interface around long past the time I pulled it out of my rack. It made a great test unit and I was able to help a number of people with installation issues etc.

Once I verified that FW was gone for good in Tahoe, I sold it on eBay with the clear caveat that Sequoia was the end of the line for that beast and the various issues facing Windows users (best with Texas Instruments FW card etc.). It sold faster than I expected for more than my opening price.

Can't it work as a standalone adat interface?

 

[FoxyKaye]

The kext that make firewire work had literally one update in ten years, it's been the same. It cost them nothing to maintain.

I am a bit hesitant to re-engage with this thread, because, WOW, there has been some flame wars while I haven't been watching. But I do want to ask: Is there no way this could be turned into an Open Source project, similar to what has been done with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, or potentially even through this existing tool?

 

[toke lahti]

As a collector, using a new Mac for my old iPods usually is more problematic than it is good so just something I avoid.

FireWire devices, I only use on a Mac that has it natively, so the newest device I connect my 3rd gen iPod to is my 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro, or, my Mac Pro 5,1. Nothing newer with adapters as Apple Music seems to hate old iPods.

I've been using fw with my mini2018 flawlessly with adaptors and will continue to do so.
I have 2 adapter sets ans a fw hub (1-to-4).
So 5 fw ports to use taking up 2 tb3 sockets.
And since I also have tb hub, I have 6 tb ports anf those fw connections occupy only 2 of those.
No problems with adaptors whatsoever.

 

[toke lahti]

Even modern best in class interfaces ($2000+) use USB 2.0, as the bandwidth is more than what is necessary even for 24/768kHz audio, which is FAR more than most studios are using.

OMG, is there really audio equipment that use 768kHz sampling rate?
Talk about overkill...

 

[MrRom92]

OMG, is there really audio equipment that use 768kHz sampling rate?
Talk about overkill...

Not for every application. But even on my equipment I set it down to 192khz if that is the target deliverable

 

[mikehalloran]

Can't it work as a standalone adat interface?

Yes. In stand-alone mode, the MOTU 828mkII FW defaults to ADAT to Analog or vise versa. In addition, there are function buttons for other purposes. You may have to set it back to factory defaults for this to work—see below:

For anything else, you can program it on a Mac (before Tahoe) or PC with a FW card (works best with Texas Instruments FW card on a PC) and it will remember those settings in NVM.

 

[lensartist]

I use Firewire for 2 devices. A HDV player and a Nikon Coolscan 35mm Film scanner. I use 3 dongles to get firewire 400 to 800 to thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3. It works for me. I hope firewire will be supported. Or, I will have to set up this on my 2012 MacMini.

Hi, came across your mention of maybe needing to go to you MacMini to use your Nikon Coolscan. I had similar issue and did this to solve the issue:

"I worked on setting up my 2012 MacMini6.2 computer, connected to an Apple Thunderbolt 2, 27" Display to get Windows 10 and Nikon Scan 4.0.3 up and running. It is now up and running Nikon Scan under Windows 10 software.

The 2012 MacMini came out originally in two versions, one was 6.1 as a normal computer and the other as 6.2 as a server computer. This one is the server unit, but there's not any significant difference, both had a quad-core processor of which the 2014 and 2018 units did not. It came with a HGST 1TB 5,400 RPM drive as the top drive which was being used as a Time Machine backup of the other 250GB drive. The second drive was a Western Digital WD Blue 250GB SATA PC SSD. I ran both Blackmagic Speed Disk and AJA System Test Lite on both drives and decided to replace them, as I was only getting about 49-54 MB/Sec write and read speeds. I decided to install in the lower slot a SAMSUNG 870 EVO 500GB SSD as the system disk on which I installed MacOS Mojave 10.14.6, and I am now getting about 490 MB/Sec write and 525 MB/Sec read speeds. In the upper slot I installed a SAMSUNG 870 EVO 1TB SSD as a separate system disk on which I installed MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 and got the same speeds when tested.

Currently I have no plans to install any programs on either, but may install some of ADOBE's Creative Suite 6 so I can run InDesign when needed. I use my newer MacBook Pro M3 Max to run Photoshop, Lightroom and ON1 software for images.

Now for Nikon Scan. I chose to use the 500GB drive running MacOS Mojave to partition when I used Boot Camp to install the Windows 10 iOS installer. The partition size was made to about 150GB and the other side left for Mac OS. Then once that was successful I booted up Windows 10 to install the Nikon Scan 4.0.3 and make sure it was working properly."

I can provide more details on the setup procedures if there is any interest. Cheers

 

[yayarod]

NTFS is available for macOS as an add on.
I hope this would also be possible with FireWire.
Otherwise I'll need to keep my Mac mini M2 Pro on macOS Sequoia to run a Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 4000ED film scanner that has a FireWire interface.