AMT8 in Catalina

[Jay Vaughan]

Just reporting in that I've had nothing but great success with the Roland UM880, which still works not only in Mac OS but also superlatively in Linux.  It easily outperforms any other interfaces I've had in terms of latency and ease-of-use, including the ones for which I wrote the firmware myself, such as the Steinberg MI series.  

In my jam setup I personally also have Motu MTP, and E-magic interfaces - had to finally scrap the Motu on the MacOS DAW, although E-magic is very well supported on Linux even still today.  

At SkyStudio we are using nothing but UAD - we have everything from Arrow, to Apollo to x16, which is also rock solid.

I think the key thing is that a lot of these old MIDI interfaces needed firmware shims to get started - that is they don't have non-volatile RAM on board and therefore don't have the firmware stored in the device, but instead require the OS driver to transfer the firmware blob on device enumeration, which results in a two-step driver process - first to recognize the device and load its firmware blob, and then to enumerate and load the standard MIDI class device Driver once the blob is running.

Alas with the latest Mac OS shenanigans, vis-à-vis 32-bit to 64-bit leap, the shim drivers are getting left behind. Seems like it might be an opportunity for third-party developers somewhere along the lines to back port support these old devices.
 
Anyway it's interesting to learn of the new stuff that’s out, such as the ESI. 

J.