Mbox and Garage Band

Posted on January 14th, 2008 by phiber811, under John, Service Rants, main.

Periodically I get email from people who’ve been linked to MYM from a google search, that are looking for information on getting Digidesign’s Mbox to work with Apple’s GarageBand.

Originally, I did this more than 4 years ago, when the Mbox was new on the market. Back then, GarageBand was pretty new too. I want to say that I probably did this around 2001. So, its been a few years. I hosted the info for a good long time, but as the computer industry rolls over on a pretty regular cycle, it eventually became outdated.

Since then, Digidesign has released an entirely new line of Mbox products as the Mbox 2 Family. Likewise, we’ve gone from the original iLife to iLife 08. In that time, apple has also bought Logic and proceeded to base Garage Band and Logic express and Logic Pro on their software property acquisition. In short, what I did back so many years ago is pretty well outdated.

Also figure that there are currently audio input ports on all of Apple’s currently shipping and recently shipping machines. With this in mind, it isn’t hard to find a 1/4th inch to stereo-mini adapter, and plug your guitar or other standard 1/4th inch instrument cable into your Mac. Likewise, there are enough USB/Midi devices out there that dont require an Mbox style setup. To that end, you really don’t need an Mbox, if all you’re looking to do is plug in a guitar. Of course, I wont even get into the fact that back then, I was doing everything with a 500MHz G3 iBook, and the latency was horrid.

However, if you really want to attempt this, what you need to do is hunt around online for the latest DigiDesign Core Audio drivers and install them. Once they’re active, you should be able to configure OSX to see the Mbox as an audio input device. Then you can load GarageBand and configure it to accept input from the Mbox as its real instrument input.

Given this, you ought to be able to make it work. I cant promise that it will still work or how well it will work. It may not. You may get lots of static, or no amplification. I don’t know. I haven’t had an Mbox in several years. I now mic my amp and line straight into my MacBook Pro when I want to record.

If you’re looking for the old pages I put up regarding this, please search google, and see if they’ve cached it, or if Archive.org has cached it. I no longer have those pages, nor did I save that data. If this disappoints you, I’m sorry. I’m sure someone else out there in Internet Land duplicated what I did, and posted it somewhere. Someplace like maybe the forums on Digidesign’s website. Keep digging and good luck!

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