It arrived yesterday, which was a total surprise! The seller had despatched it even before paying my cheque into his account.
So how did I get on with it? Read on...
Mac G4 tower / OSX Panther 10.3.9
Initially, I had some problems. The drivers and software supplied with it are purely Windows-specific, so there was nothing to be done but plug it into my trusty old G4 and see what happened...
In true Mac fashion, the OS immediately recognized what it was and I was able to select it as a USB audio input device, but I couldn't arrange for live monitoring to be fed back through to its headphone socket, and when I did achieve some kind of live play-through on my speakers, the latency was too long to allow for proper as-you-play monitoring.
HOWEVER, these issues were
not the fault of the unit itself. They were entirely to do with the slightly bonkers way my ancient Mac G4 and its Panther installation handles audio throughput. That's a long story and I won't bore you with the details of it.
Fortunately, today I managed to find a cure. I got hold of an old, Panther-friendly version of the freeware app called "LineIn":
Current version of LineIn (OSX 10.4and above)
Older versions (OSX 10.3 and before)
This has solved ALL of the above problems. With this app running, I can now monitor on headphones plugged into the unit itself, or monitor on speakers using the Mac's analogue audio line output, and the latency has been reduced to a much more usable level: not zero by any means, but quick enough not to fuck with your head while you're playing: it's a bit like a very fast slap-back echo.
Using this setup and Audacity, I have just recorded
this sound sample - me playing the intro to "Don't Play That Song To Me" on my Ovation Magnum. The Magnum has a big, deep, rolling timbre, and I think you will agree that this tonal quality comes through very nicely on the recording. I would say that it's a very accurate representation of how this bass sounds.
The only thing I can't do with it - and again, I must stress that this is a foible of my old Mac - is adjust the input recording level. This is a shame, as the unit's instrument input appears to be surprisingly insensitive (the above sample had to be normalized to -1dB using Audacity, and it required about 15dB of boost to reach that level
). The unit's input has a 2-position sensitivity switch and an LED which warns you of clipping, but even when using an active bass I had to have the switch set to high sensitivity and no matter how hard I played, there was never the slightest chance of making that LED flash. I suspect that the manufacturer has set the sensitivity deliberately low in order to cope with geetar loonies who have a rack full of FX and boost pedals. If it was more sensitive, I'm sure that my recordings would have much better signal-to-noise than the sample above.
Windows XP on an ACER Aspire 5100 Laptop
I loaded the supplied ASIO drivers, set the latencies according to the instructions and installed the free version of "Guitar Rig 2.2" that came with it. Interestingly, this was the only piece of software on the machine that would recognize it as an audio input device. None of my other recording programs could see it at all, including Audacity.
Headphone monitoring worked fine and latency was very low - virtually instant. However, the signal coming from the unit suffered from random pops and crackles which made a clean recording impossible. I didn't bother going much further with it from there, as I was tired and unwilling to fight with it any longer!
So that's about it. IMHO the device does what it says on the tin. Now that I've found an app that enables fast-ish play-thru monitoring, it works very happily with my 10-year-old G4 machine. With a more up-to-date machine and OS, I'm sure it would work even better. My only quibble is with its apparently low input sensitivity - but even that could turn out to be a software issue.
Linear Mode
