whats up with this sonic solutions medianet thing macos plus?
what is it? what do u use it for?
It's a combination of a SCSI accelerator and network server/client device that was intended back-in-tha-day to be used for high performance audio/video, broadcast and publishing applications. By high performance I mean 100Mbit at a time when most computers had 10Mbit ethernet. It has a fibre optic interface as an option, plus a copper equivalent like cat5 but with FDDI protocol based on a token ring architecture. While it could run as a stand-alone entity, its primary target was integrated as a vast performance and feature enhancement add-on to the Sonic Solutions DAW hardware as an 'evolved' version of the earlier SonicNet.
The problem I have with it is that there is an unresolved massive incompatibily between these cards and OS 9. The Sonic Solutions DAW cards themselves work just fine under OS 9, but the capabilities and expandability of the system is dramatically reduced, including losing the ability to network multiple systems' audio disks. When the Medianet extension loads the computer slows to a crawl for some reason. It also no longer shows up as an available port in the AppleTalk selector, which is a necessity to function.
I have a lot of this hardware and extensive sound libraries in the Sonic-native file/partion format. My goal was to expand my host computer options and compatibility with other software/hardware by making Medianet work with OS 9. Some of the Sonic DAW processing features are CPU- bound, so later hardware could also significantly speed up some routine functions.
