A little help for a new Mac user?

Rob Spence

Rob Spence

Senior
Jan 11, 2011
897
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Boston Metro North West
www.lynxaudioservices.com
While this might be OT, I am using the MacBook to record/playback music so...

I have an external firewire 800 disk I want to use for the recordings. It is currently formatted as NTFS and shows up in Finder as read only. All data has been removed from the drive. What do you suggest so I can write to it from my MacBook?

Thanks

BTW, for those interested in Dante...
I have my configuration working now. Two Dante cards in the LS9 to a Netgear N600 Gigabit router to the Macbook. I also have the LS9 console plugged in to the router and am using my LE1600 tablet with AirFader to the LS9 wireless. The MacBook is configured so I can connect wireless to another network with Internet access at the same time it is connected to the Dante network. I have done an initial test recording and playing back 32 channels while operating the LS9 from the tablet and reading my email on the MacBook. This test was done writing to the internal disk. :)

My first real test will be this Friday.
 
Re: A little help for a new Mac user?

I hit exactly the same snag when I first started using a mac.

MacOS cannot write to NTFS as standard. As you have noted it is able to read from NTFS drives fine.

What I did was format my external drive to MacOS Extended and then put a program called MacDrive (from Mediafour I think) onto my Windows machines so I can read and write to that drive.

MacOS will read and write to FAT32 formatted drives, which is what most memory sticks are so they normally work straight away. I stayed away from using FAT for external drives as I believe it has some issues with larger files.

Take a look at http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems for a bit of info on the different formats.


HTH

Gareth
 
Re: A little help for a new Mac user?

The maximum file size on a FAT32 formatted volume is 1 byte less than 4GB. This can be a problem with say video files. Generally for audio, it will be a non issue. If working on a mac, formatting as MacOS Extended (journaled) is your best choice for performance, reliability and compatibility. The downside is that the drive won't work on a Windows machine without additional software.
 
Re: A little help for a new Mac user?

Gareth Marsh said:
What I did was format my external drive to MacOS Extended and then put a program called MacDrive (from Mediafour I think) onto my Windows machines so I can read and write to that drive.
Click to expand...

We've been doing the same for a while. Anything that is used on a Mac is formatted natively for the Mac. The Win boxes then get MacDrive to read and write to the Mac disks. http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive
 
Re: A little help for a new Mac user?

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I am going to format the drive to be native Mac and use MacDrive or the network to move the recordings to the servers.

I got another silly question...
I am trying to get Studio Manager running on my Mac. I am stuck at configuring the Midi ports. The Network Driver config doesn't have anything to set the ports like the Windows one does.
 
Re: A little help for a new Mac user?

Rob Spence said:
Thanks for the suggestions. I think I am going to format the drive to be native Mac and use MacDrive or the network to move the recordings to the servers.

I got another silly question...
I am trying to get Studio Manager running on my Mac. I am stuck at configuring the Midi ports. The Network Driver config doesn't have anything to set the ports like the Windows one does.
Click to expand...

Go into the Network Driver and define the host profile with a valid IP address. Confirm that and open SM2 and go to "Re-Map MIDI Ports" in the File menu and that should allow you to map SM2 MIDI to your network adapter.

Dave
 
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