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[Naiw]

What PCI soundcards for Mac OS 9 are the best/easiest to get by these days?

(That preferably have line level in/midi, if that was not standard back then)

[IIO]

the "best", if not mykerinos 16 bit, is probably the RME series. they had OS9 driver support up to around 2008.

but why do you want PCI?

[miracman]

Hey!

IIO suggestions are on a more expensive level. 

It used to be easy to get something like a Delta 1010 (M-audio) for cheap over eBay.  I mean the rackmount one (not the 1010LT).  I just checked and only saw one complete from Russia, not that cheap.  A lot of sellers try to only sell the rack part, which, without the pci card part is just a not so cheap big paper weight (the same goes for old digi 001). 

You were looking for multi channels, right?

[Naiw]

the "best", if not mykerinos 16 bit, is probably the RME series. they had OS9 driver support up to around 2008.

but why do you want PCI?

PCI mainly because I want as low latency as possible.

[Naiw]

Hey!

IIO suggestions are on a more expensive level. 

It used to be easy to get something like a Delta 1010 (M-audio) for cheap over eBay.  I mean the rackmount one (not the 1010LT).  I just checked and only saw one complete from Russia, not that cheap.  A lot of sellers try to only sell the rack part, which, without the pci card part is just a not so cheap big paper weight (the same goes for old digi 001). 

You were looking for multi channels, right?

Oh so the delta series work with OS 9? I actually have an Delta 44 laying around somewhere, unfortunately it don't have midi though but perhaps the midi part can be solved via some USB device instead.

Multi channel is not that important- although convenient as I mainly intend to connect some old kurzweil synths and I could live with recording the output through a mixer, but of course it would be more convenient to have each stem separately to start with.

My main goal is mostly to just see if I can make a decent home studio just for fun, but to try to get as high end as I can with the least possible means as possible.
And in particular cause I have some Kurzweil K2000 and K2500 Racks laying around that I really don't use (since I got my PC3x) and it would be more fun just to have a time authentic setup I think.

I don't do music professionally (but I already have a pretty decent setup on the PC and I can't imagine this vintage gear can compete with that in anyway or form anyway, so it's mostly because I always wanted something half decent for classic mac os, but in the past such things been ridiculously expensive- and perhaps they still are in which case I guess I just forget about it.)

[Andre Solomko]

As a matter of fact "vintage" devices can compete with modern  easely .Since the last 20years nothing major happened in this industry not counting onscreen pictures of cource.Now  you can get anything you were dreaming about for a bargain. Like firewire cards for example or pci.
Look for echo branded cards. Quite solid under 9×   like echo Layla.Even ultra expensive pro tools dropped like 10 times in price.

[Naiw]

As a matter of fact "vintage" devices can compete with modern  easely .Since the last 20years nothing major happened in this industry not counting onscreen pictures of cource.Now  you can get anything you were dreaming about for a bargain. Like firewire cards for example or pci.
Look for echo branded cards. Quite solid under 9×   like echo Layla.Even ultra expensive pro tools dropped like 10 times in price.

Well something happened and that was that the DSP power increased significantly with modern machines. I for example mostly use software synthesizers and I believe a ~20 year old mac could dream of running even the filter of a single instance of one of these in realtime.

But either way, thanks for the tips- I'll look around a bit, I guess firewire cards would work fine as well as it's essentially an extension of the PCI bus anyway so they ought to have similar performance.

[miracman]

Oh so the delta series work with OS 9? I actually have an Delta 44 laying around somewhere, unfortunately it don't have midi though but perhaps the midi part can be solved via some USB device instead.
(...)

Some of the cards from the Delta series work with OS 9.  There is some info here about the m-audio drivers (2nd post shows a list of compatible models with OS 9): http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,1933.0.html

The same thread links to the download section for those mentioned drivers.

You can use the "Hardware Drivers for the Classic Mac OS" section for inspiration, be it DSP or the Audio/MIDI drivers section.  IIO mentionned the RME series and you can see on their website that they still have at least 2 drivers for OS 8.6+ in their archive.  I just mean to make sure you can get some sort of driver before buying... those get harder and harder to find.

Good hunt! 

[Naiw]

Some of the cards from the Delta series work with OS 9.  There is some info here about the m-audio drivers (2nd post shows a list of compatible models with OS 9): http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,1933.0.html

The same thread links to the download section for those mentioned drivers.

You can use the "Hardware Drivers for the Classic Mac OS" section for inspiration, be it DSP or the Audio/MIDI drivers section.  IIO mentionned the RME series and you can see on their website that they still have at least 2 drivers for OS 8.6+ in their archive.  I just mean to make sure you can get some sort of driver before buying... those get harder and harder to find.

Good hunt! 

Yes you're right, thank you. It appears the Delta 44 is supported by OS 9- So I guess the next question is what sound program to use

[IIO]

ASIO of delta 44 can be a bit picky when a program sends denormal data in the stream. that wont happen with cubase or logic, there it works fine.

[Naiw]

ASIO of delta 44 can be a bit picky when a program sends denormal data in the stream. that wont happen with cubase or logic, there it works fine.

Alright, thanks.