Monday 5 October 2009

Toneport on Snow Leopard

UPDATE (25-Nov): Please read: 4.2.5 beta drivers are available.

I managed to get my Toneport UX2 working on my (2009 Intel) MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard after a bit of fiddling around. I installed Snow Leopard before finding out that my UX2 is not officially support yet (doh!), but there are beta drivers. I take this to mean that they haven't ironed all the issues out. I couldn't find anything (easily) on the Line 6 forums to help sorting this out. It seems a lot of people have the same problem.

Writing drivers is complicated, and converting drivers from 32 to 64 bit is non-trivial. If you've tried to run Vista 64 they had all the same issues (i.e. no/buggy 64 driver support for a lot of things for quite a while).

Initially I just installed the latest 4.2.4 drivers, but this created "choppy noise" (cutting out, popping, white noise, etc). I did get the "kext" error whilst installing, so assume something was going wrong (but I didn't spend time finding out what). Snow Leopard is all 64 bit now, so some drivers won't work. If you just install the latest drivers something must get confused.

The trick is to completely remove all Line 6 software and start again. I rebooted several times, cautiously, to allow the OS to remove unwanted files. I used AppCleaner to uninstall applications because otherwise some files get left behind (e.g. config and data files). If you don't use AppCleaner, this won't work.
  • Restart (so we start with clean slate).
  • Run AppCleaner.
  • Uninstall Line 6 Gearbox using AppCleaner.
  • Uninstall Line 6 Monkey using AppCleaner.
  • Restart.
  • Uninstall Line 6 drivers (Use program in Line 6 directory in Applications).
  • Restart (to start again with no Line 6 software).
  • Install latest Gearbox (3.70, contains 3.4 drivers).
  • Install latest (4.2.4) drivers (over Gearbox drivers).
  • Restart.
After you have done this your Toneport should work as normal. The order is important. My Toneport works fine with Garageband and Gearbox now. I'll keep an eye out for new drivers.

Not a bad idea to bung the guy who wrote AppCleaner a couple of bucks, because this won't work otherwise. :)

I'm not a Line 6 support engineer, if this doesn't work for you, sorry!

UPDATE (7-Oct): After disconnecting the UX2 and using my laptop elsewhere, and then plugging the UX2 back in, the crackling came back again. I managed to get rid of this by leaving the UX2 plugged into the USB port and rebooting the Macbook. It seems like disconnecting the UX2 and/or the Macbook going into sleep breaks something in the 4.2.4 drivers so you have to reset the machine.

3 comments:

juvadi said...

I did it exactly as you wrote but unfortunately without success. First I tried the procedure with the new POD Farm instead of the Gearbox Software AND with Gearbox. Neither one of them worked properly. I still have these annoying crackling noises. So as long as there is no other way I gues I have to wait for a new driver from Line 6... :(

I spent nearly 200 bucks for this UX2-thingy Line 6 and I cannot use it!

BQ said...

Yeah, sorry it didn't work for you. It is frustrating, and I upgraded to SL before I read that Line 6 don't support it yet as well. I guess I got lucky as the UX2 seems to work (just).

It was the same thing with Vista as well, it took months for a lot of manufacturers to write 64 bit drivers. It's an awkward transition going to 64 bit, you get all kinds of weird bugs in your code. But I won't be holding out much sympathy for Line 6 if the problem isn't solved in the next month or so...

nch said...

Thanks for the write-up! It really helped me get Gearbox installed and working with my UX2 on Snow Leopard.

I had no success at first, but then had a peek around the Library folders and realized that there were still Line6 files hanging around even after using AppCleaner. When I deleted them manually before installing Gearbox 3.70 and latest drivers (4.2.5 BETA), everything seems to work fine. That is, everything except LineMonkey which has been disabled while Line6 is working on fixing it.

These are the files I removed manually:

/Library/Audio/MIDI Devices/Line 6/
/Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/Line6MIDI.plugin
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/GearBoxAU.component
/Library/Preferences/com.line6.4142.plist
/Library/PreferencePanes/Line6AudioMIDI.prefPane
~/Library/Preferences/com.line6.L6TPortB.plist
~/Library/Caches/com.line6.gearbox