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Mac OS 10.3.3  [ Edit ] 

Mac OS X was updated to 10.3.3 last week. The list of changes was long, and included some bits that were of interest to musicians, like support for mLan. I don’t use a Firewire audio interface, though, so mLan doesn’t interest me.

Well, apparently 10.3.3 had a little something for me too. It appears not to have fixed an issue I’ve been having with my MobilePre.

[ UPDATE — Apparently I spoke too soon. The jury is still out on why the box freezes, and what to do about it. For now, the workaround is to reboot the machine while I set up the microphones. Sigh. ]

My MobilePre is a nice little audio interface for the price. The only problem is, my machine has frozen every time I plugged it in. Not a kernel panic or anything drastic, but the kind of freeze where the mouse stops moving, and the machine appears to be dead. Usually, if I unplugged the MobilePre, the machine would come back to life after a while (one to five minutes).

Over the weekend, I decided to try to figure this out. I removed some kernel extensions for software I use, but could live without if I had to (like USB Overdrive) and tried to isolate the problem.

At first, I thought USB Overdrive might have been at fault. It turns out that was wrong. After a fresh restart, the MobilePre could be plugged in and unplugged without difficulty. After using the Powerbook for a while, though, a time would come when plugging in the MobilePre would cause a freeze. I didn’t take the time to figure out what I needed to have done to cause this, but eventually it did.

The solution I arrived at was to do the equivalent of slapping the machine upside the head. I logged in remotely and ran a utility. It didn’t matter what I did — the act of logging in, maybe even just the attempt, was enough to unfreeze the Mac.

This was good news, if highly inconvenient. So the next step was to figure out if I could snap the machine out of its trance without having to leave the desk. The solution I came up with was removing a USB device (like my Logic XS key, Logic’s anti-piracy toy), and plugging that back in. This procedure worked several times.

I updated to 10.3.3 this morning, worked on the machine all day, and just tried several times plugging in and unplugging the MobilePre. Amazingly, no freezes.

I hope I don’t have to update this article with a sob story later, because this makes me happy. Users of USB sound devices who are using Panther should definitely update to 10.3.3.

Posted by Joe