MOTU 24I/O And PCI Drivers on Catalina & Big Sur

Posted by Tony on 11/21/2020

I’ve hacked together a way of getting my 4x MOTU 24I/Os (and likely all other MOTU PCI / PCI-E devices) working on newer version of MacOS.

I’m fucking pissed off with unnecessarily dropping support for hardware – especially stunningly expensive, niche hardware. Not only would it cost me a small fortune to replace the 24I/Os, but I’d spend weeks rewiring my studio.

Right so, to get these fuckers working on you newer MacOS device here’s what you need:

SOFTWARE

PROCESS

Open Terminal are do the following: “sudo mount -uw /”. This mounts the System partition of MacOS and makes it writable. This is where we’ll be installing the drivers.

Open MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg with Pacifist. You should see the following.

Right click on “Contents of PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg” and select “Install to Default Location…”

If you receive any errors at this point, it’s likely that your System partition isn’t writable. Go have a look on Google to see what you need to do.

Next, we need to open the newer MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (83634).pkg with Pacifist. First thing I should draw your attention to is that those cunts have removed the PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg.

So now we need to install the applications by opening “Contents of Common.pkg / Applications” There you should see “CueMix FX.app”, which for my purposes is required to get my set up customised to how I needed it. The drives should work without this, but you’d be missing some functionality.

Anyway drag “CueMix FX.app” to your Applications folder and restart your computer. After a reboot you should now see that everything is working as it should.

Since we don’t have an app to allow us to change the sample rate of the device now, this can be done natively in MacOS “Audio Midi Setup”



9 comments

9 comments on “MOTU 24I/O And PCI Drivers on Catalina & Big Sur”

  1. This is big news for motu pcie uses. Thanks! This news to find people before they potentially spend ££$$$£££$$ on new equipment.

    Reply

    • This works 🙂 I’m running Sur 11.2.3 on a MacPro 5,1. You have to disable SIP (boot a USB stick, bring up an admin window … csrutil disable … csrutil status … I had to do this a few times before it really took for whatever reason which is just Apple junk if you ask me. The best I think is just checking the nvram setting csr-active-config in OSX recovery mode (again from booting off a USB stick for Sur 11.2.3) .. and then nvram -p … shows me csr-active-config was set to %7f%00%00%00 … hooray. Then I boot 11.2.3 and I follow the Pacifist directions (and yes thank you a million times over). It’s sad that these companies squeeze money out of us. Just give people reasonable upgrade paths and we’ll do it but instead we all get cut off and forced to do figure out how to use tools to get around everything which people will always figure out … so hint apple and MOTU : a way to get our money is have a reasonable upgrade path and not

      Anyways everything mentioned here works for PCIE-4242 and 2408Mk3 as well. I have a 1296 I’m going to hook up as well. I can control the sample rate through the DAW so ok that’s awesome. The caveat for me is I can’t control some of the other things not exposed through the DAW on my MOTU hardware … which for the 2408mk3 it thinks the 1st bank is analog (I want all 3 banks ADAT) … and of course the MOTU app to configure that doesn’t run on Sur !

      Again like it’s killing these vendors to do a few builds … OR JUST RELEASE THE SOURCE CODE … OR BETTER YET … THE INTERCONNECT IT FW SO JUST GIVE PEOPLE A WAY TO FLASH THE DEVICES and control all this stuff over FW if that’s a better way of lett people use their old now unsupported hardware … unless I’ve really not understanding the problem (which I think is called greed if you ask me).

      Reply

  2. I just need a build of “MOTU PCI Audio Setup.app” for Big Sur (more like a 64-bit build) and then I can configure the MOTU hardware the way I want to again (instead of the defaults where BANK A is analog by default on a 2408mk3 .. I usually turn them all 2408mk3 banks ADAT). Same deal with the1296 as by default “channels 9-12 aren’t analog”. Come on MOTU just build the “PCI Audio Setup” app for 64bit and let us on our way.

    Reply

    • Yup, I have the same issue. I can’t find a way to configure the devices correctly without that app. Luckily everything is set up as I need right now however I am in the process of purchasing an HD192 which I will need to configure to use AES on one of the outputs.

      I’m not sure what we can really do regarding this… Has anyone tried running the 32bit app in a Virtual Machine? Can it interface with the hardware from there? Or would it be possible to have a second install of a 32bit OS (do the configurations save to the hardware?)

      The real goal would be to reverse engineer the old app and have a 64bit version created.

      Reply

  3. oh yeah … you just gave me an idea … what if you loaded vmware fusion on sur … and then created a mojave VM … then you could load the apps and the driver on that maybe and then copy the configs off the VM and put them in place on the host OS (which would be sur in this example).

    Reply

  4. Tony only thing I could find that might help right now is this …

    https://motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=66861&start=15

    looks like the person ran the tools under mojave … and copied the right plist files.

    Turns out that if I copy these .plist files over to a new Catalina install (from Mojave in my case) and reboot, I got my settings (for instance, all my channels) back:

    from /Library/Preferences: everything that starts with com.motu, including the folder
    from /Library/Preferences/Audio: com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist

    Reply

    • Very interesting… I’ll have a good read through all of that and see what I can come up with. Thank you very much for the link!

      Reply

  5. don’t waste your time trying to do this through a VM using VMWARE or Parallels. I got a spare SSD, loaded Mojave , booted it, loaded MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg , and then grabbed

    from /Library/Preferences: everything that starts with com.motu, including the folder
    from /Library/Preferences/Audio: com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist

    and I took the MOTU User settings and put them on Big sur (backing up what was on Sur 1st)… and it worked.

    I’m into a different problem now … Cause I have a MOTU 1296, then TWO 2408mk3 units, and I’m using logic … and I’m doing surround sound and I see meters for 6 meters on the 1296 move BUT I need to create a bus in logic for a stereo mix and send that all to my 2408mk3 … BUT because I’m at a rate of 96khz channels 1 and 3 on the 2408mk3 are being sent the audio and the headphone is configured for chanels one and 2 so I only get the left channel of audio…. so I have to boot mojave and see what I can change so that channels 1 & 3 are used for the stereo pair sent to my headphones on the 2408mk3. I hope that made sense … that’s how I unprofessionally understand the problem !

    Reply

  6. I loaded Mojave on another SSD , and then got to the point to run the PCI Audio App. I created some configs zipping up each one as I went along. In the end all I wound up moving over (from Mojave to Sur) were my PCI-424.bus5.slot0.plist and PCI-424.bus5.slot0.smux.plist file under /Users/admin/Library/Preferences.

    Again shame on you MOTU … the PCI-424 driver still works on Sur. Either update the PCI Audio Setup App to be 64-bit or release the source on GitHub.

    Reply

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