since yesterday, i’ve been trying to set up ardour on my mbp (unibody, 2.53dual, 4gb, osx10.5.6, admin), but have failed due to an weird bug in osx’ audio/midi-setup:
everytime i try to create an aggregate device using built in linein and headphone jack, i can only create a either just output or just input, depending on which channel i check on first. i’m logged in as admin and have performed all system updates, yet not succeeded. i’ve tried to do the same on some macbooks running on leopard and imacs on tiger, and it worked well, only my book seems to f*ck up.
i’d appreciated some help, because i was really looking forward to the ported version of ardour and linux week linz ( http://rzprk.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/liwoli-09/ ) is coming up. and i found no matching threads or replies in apples support discussions (surprise, surprise).
I have found through many troubles that the sample rate set in the audio midi control panel causes issues with aggregate devices. After creating an aggregate device that works, something will change the sample rate to a setting that OSX does not like. It will then remove the output device from the aggregate device and VOILA ardour will no longer start, or jack for that matter, if using that aggregate device.
Jumping into audio/midi control panel and just changing the sample rate to something other than it is currently set to for the aggregate device seems to fix it just fine.
Sadly, finding bugs with creating aggregate devices doesn’t surprise me to much, there are now several issues I have come across in one form or another with that process. Thank Apple for requiring it for some god awful reason on newer versions of OS X(It didn’t used to be required, Built-In Input and Built-In Output would show up as a single device instead of two seperate ones).
The only thing I can suggest is, do you have multiple aggregate devices set up? If so get rid of all of them and start from scratch. You mentioned already having set up aggregate devices on other machines with no problem, so I assume you are familiar by now with the process. I know in the past I have had issues with setting up multiple aggregate devices on the same machine, so I would start there, but sadly I can’t give you but so much help on it as it is very much an Apple bug at this point, sorry.
surprisingly, setting up an aggregate device worked well today, although i swear having performed exactly the same things (including some reboots) i did the other day. i still have some other minor issues to deal with, but ardour starts up at least and i’m almost there. there’s a linux week in my hometown next week and i want to join some DAE workshops…