Setting up old musical gear with MacMini 2012 Server

Mac OSX makes it so easy to set up a simple music studio since it comes with GarageBand .  But how about connecting musical instruments to my Mac (MacMini 2012 Server) so that I can record music that I played on these musical instruments?

My goal is to connect the following devices to my MacMini, which at the back of my head, I know that they should all work fine since I connected them with my MacMini 2009 before:

• Yamaha DGX-630 digital piano 
• Roland TD-1 digital drumset with MidiMan Midisport 2x2 Interface
• M-Audio Firewire Solo with a dynamic mic connected to it from the front input

At the end I was ABLE to connect all of them to my MacMini 2012 Server with OSX Yosemite 10.10.1, but with various gottacha and caution that I need to be aware of.

Yamaha DGX-630 

Connecting DGX-360 to MacMini is pretty simple as long as you have the right drive and the commonly available USB cable.  For driver, I downloaded um132mx.zip, which is a USB MIDI driver.  Then I grabbed a regular USB cable with one Type A male head and a Type B male head at the other side.  I connected the B-Type head to the Yamaha piano while A-Type head connected to the Mac.  With that and the driver installed, Garbage Band recognize the key I pressed on my digital piano with pressure sensitivity.  Make sure, though, that you reboot the machine since the driver require that to work.

Roland TD-1 with MidiMan Midisport 2x2 Interface

This connection is also easy, which surprised with considered that my MidiMan Midisport 2x2 Interface is almost like 20 years old.  In fact, I brought it back when I was still using PowerMac Quadra 610.  So I was surprised that the driver is available (MIDI_USB_OSX_3.5.3.dmg), So I had the driver installed, rebooted the MacMini, and then connect all the standard MIDI and USB cables.  After Garbage Band spent half an hour or so to download 15Gb+ drum related fields (yep, should had been done it at work), I now am able to use my TD-1 as the MIDI drum control and record drum pattern to Garbage Band,  Notice that MidiMan 2x2 is now sold as so called "anniversary version", and still have new driver support.

M-Audio Firewire Solo 

This one is the trickest, because ever since Apple abandoned Firewire the interface format, support for Firewire devices were gradually fading away.  In fact, the latest driver I could get was FireWire_OSX_1_10_3.zip, And even this one has all kind of problem on OSX 10,10:

• Preference screen doesn't work
• Uninstaller DOES NOT work

A lot of people has the same problem as me, and there's no solution for these problem.  HOWEVER, the interface indeed works since I can adjust the recording level on Sound preference window.  So to me, I accepted the fact that at least this 15+ years old piece of hardware still works.  Also the Firewire port on the MacMini 2012 Server also works fine.  When I record audio, I don't need to turn on the phantom power.  Firewire port was able to provide power to drive the Firewire Solo device, which is pretty nice (unlike my experience with doing it on a Windows computer).  In fact, with the quietness of MacMini, this will be a much better audio recording device than my Dell XPS desktop, which constantly creating some low frequency humming noise.