I purchased an Intel Mac, but found out that the drivers for my Yamaha UX-16 MIDI Interface don't work on the new machine, so I couldn't use my new machine to record into GarageBand. Good thing is that I still have my old PowerBook G4, which works just fine with the UX-16, so I thought I'd try to somehow forward MIDI input received by PowerBook to my Intel iMac. And fortunately, I found just the way to do it. The secret was to use Apple's standard Audio MIDI Setup application. Here's how I did it:
- The Macs need to be connected via some kind of local network first.
- Open Audio MIDI Setup on both, in the Utilities folder.
- There should be a Network item in the MIDI Devices tab. Double-click it to open it.
- On both Macs: Add a new Session by clicking the "+" button under My Sessions, and check Enabled in the Session section.
- Both Macs should, by this time, see each other by means of Bonjour (and display each other's names in the Directory section)
- On one of the Macs (it doesn't matter which one, I think), select the other party in the Directory section, and click Connect. Now both Macs are connected!
- On the Mac which receives data directly from the MIDI device via the MIDI Interface (my old PowerBook in this case), set the Live Routings upper pop-up menu (To Network) to the MIDI Interface device you are using to acquire data (Yamaha UX16 in my case).
- On the other (target) Mac (my Intel iMac in this case), set the Live Routings bottom popup menu (From Network) to the available Network session (should be just one item, assuming you have created only one network session).
Now you should be able to forward MIDI input from the supported device on the old Mac to the Intel Mac! Of course this only works if you have an old Mac which has compatible drivers for your MIDI interface, but at least this could be a partial solution for people stuck for some time without Intel-compatible drivers.