had enough of mac, looking for new OS and laptop

[Jay Vaughan]

> It's getting slow and unreliable.
> Nothing big, lots of little things.
> 

Very weird, this really doesn't usually happen on OSX unless you've installed a ton of CrapWare.

> For example the usb thing, if I have three or four finder windows open and
> connect a usb disk it'll show in three of them but not the fourth.(and yes
> I've been using macs for over 8 years so know about removing the disk)
> 

That is absolutely bizaare.  I've got no idea how that can happen in Finder .. 


> The MIDI interface is a huge problem, I've wasted 3 weeks trying to debug my
> sysex loader for zira only to find that its "skipping" two bytes in every 6.
> The code was right first time! I need reliable tools...
> 

How are you sending sysex MIDI data to the interface - using a *MIDIPacketList (full of sysex data) sent to MIDISend(), or "1-or-3 bytes at a time" in your own internal loop, also calling MIDISend()?  

This "Skipping two bytes" thing seems like you're running into the "MIDI is 3 bytes of data, but people send a whole Word" problem that MIDIPacketLists are supposed to prevent.  

Basically, if you try to send a sysex buffer byte-for-byte, it won't work due to the internals of CoreMIDI trying to keep the MIDI stream "properly byte aligned" (its needed for properly dealing with running status events and so on), but if you build up a MIDIPacketList as a sysex buffer, you *shouldn't* have any problems like you're experiencing.  Or, better yet, use MIDISendSysex .. this works flawlessly in my experience.

A portion of the CoreMIDI docs you may have overlooked:
"MIDIPacket; data - A variable-length stream of MIDI messages. Running status is not allowed. In the case of system-exclusive messages, a packet may only contain a single message, or portion of one, with no other MIDI events."

Dunno if that is helping you in any way, but its quite possible that the MIDI driver you're using (what is it, by the way?) is interfering with the two different entry points into a driver for MIDI data - single-message MIDI sends, and variable-length SYSEX sending .. 
 

> I may get an SSD drive and install ubuntu. Cheaper than buying new hardware,
> but I worry about driver support.
> 

Oh, Ubuntu on most modern Macs is a wonderful, wonderful thing.. *BUT* you will have to fiddle to get drivers working.  I sure hope you don't have one of those multi-chipset graphics cards .. that will suck.


> All I want is a reliable dev platform....



Get your Mac working properly, it has the potential to be extremely reliable..


;
--
Jay Vaughan