Description du poste
Now that LLMs have made many kinds of coding a matter of saying what
you're looking for, many more programs make sense. This weekend it
was audio mixing software, customized for my use case (live sound for
contra dancing) and hardware (a specific obsolete audio interface).
In 2011 PreSonus released
the 1818VSL, an 8-channel audio interface, with low-latency mixing
software. I wrote:
All I really need is a box with some amplifying inputs that send
tracks from the mic to the laptop and some outputs that let me send
mixes back out again. Then any sort of complex eq, compression, or
other effects can happen in software on the laptop. So I got one: it's
a Presonus AudioBox VSL1818, with eight usable inputs and eight usable
outputs.
At the time I did worry about how long I could expect it to be
supported:
Less future proof. My old board is almost twenty years old and is
still fully compatible with modern gear. In twenty years will I be
able to attach this box to a computer at all?
This was indeed a problem: in order to get the latency down, PreSonus
had written a custom kernel driver. This integrated very deeply with
the laptop's operating system, so that it could mix and apply effects
as quickly as possible. In 2015-09, when Apple released OS X 10.11,
they made a ton of changes, including completely rewriting the USB
driver system (IOUSBFamily to IOUSBHost) and adding System Integrity
Protection. This broke their integration, and PreSonus deprecated
the mixing software.
I was pretty grumpy about this, since this was why I bought it, and fell
back to just using it as an audio interface.
Now that computers will just do things if I explain what I want,
though, it seemed like a good time to pick this back up. I asked Opus
5.5:
I have a PreSonus Audiobox 1818VSL, which I've connected to this
computer. 12+ years ago I would use it as a hardware dsp mixer
[sic] for live sound, but then Mac changed something, PreSonus
didn't update their drivers, and since