Blackmagic Forum

I’m having some difficulties getting this to work. We just picked up a Studio Max running Monterey and a Sonnet SE IIIe PCIe external box. It fails to load the Fairlight Accelerator drivers:

DaVinci Resolve failed to initialize the Fairlight Audio Accelerator. Would you like to disable the Fairlight Audio Accelerator when you restart Resolve?
Please ensure that the Fairlight Audio Accelerator 
card is installed with appropriate drivers. If 
the card is not available, disable it.

• During the install it requires the installation of Rosetta. Is this correct? I thought DR18 was Silicon native?
• After installing the DR Fairlight Accelerator driver an error come up that says the driver was blocked and I need to contact the developer.
  

  

  Error Install.png (507.35 KiB) Viewed 1744 times

• Gatekeeper, SIP and Startup Security are all disabled on this system.

On the off chance this was a bad card or PCIe enclosure, I also have a 2018 i7 Mini running Monterey and it sailed through without any issues. It connected to the Accelerator card and the Audio interface and updated the firmware and launched Resolve with no problems.

Well, AFAIK there’s no official support for external PCIe boxes with Apple silicon. Even if some people report success with I/O cards in such a box, I would expect problems.

Well, given the limitations of the Macintosh line of computers, there isn't much in the way of options that don't allow for the use of PCIe boxes. But, yes I understand the potential pitfalls. In this instance it does not seem to be a communications error or an application error - but instead an authentication one. That is: this error occurs before the application even finishes launching and I think its due to that first error ("System Extension Blocked") that is causing this.

The Fairlight Audio Accelerator is not currently supported on Apple Silicon.
See, https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... /W-FAIR-05

Peter Chamberlain wrote:The Fairlight Audio Accelerator is not currently supported on Apple Silicon

Has this changed with the 18.5 beta?

No change

Are there any plans to implement this now that the transition to Apple Silicon is complete? Or is the card obsolete for people who upgrade their Mac system? And the I/O with it? That's quite a lot of money going down the drain.

Well, we had tons of money going down the drain when Avid left the NuBus behind. One of the reasons we have left Avid behind.
Here's hoping that BM will do better. Until now, there was not much they could rely on with only external boxes supporting PCI. But with the new Mac Pro there's a reason, even if for a small market. But audio is exactly one area of that niche.

After such a long time of not supporting the Fairlight Audio Device on new Macs, I think it's safe to say that Fairlight Hardware on Macs is dead. It's been more than three years since the M1 was introduced, plenty of time to write a driver. But I guess the user base is just too small.
This leaves me wondering if we will still be able to do the audio of bigger projects in house, i.e. if the setup without the accelerator card can manage 100+ audio tracks. If not, one huge advantage the DR has (or had) would be gone for us. And the audio guys I convinced to learn Fairlight would not be happy...

Well, let all hope go. If not with V19, then never.

Any updates on this? I took a chance and bought into Fairlight for our audio lab in our production department - I like Blackmagic and want to give our students training on a system that might one day compete with ProTools...

We are currently running this off of the last Intel i7 Mini with an RX 5900XT in an eGPU box and two more Thunderbolt PCIe boxes to run all of the cards and prop up the somewhat sluggish 2018 Mac Intel. It would be wonderful to upgrade this to a current MacPro system and show students what Farlight could really do.

I am cognizant that this market is tiny - professional audio is not where the action is - but it is a market that is willing to spend money...

If that works well with the mini, why not look for a good old 'Cheesegrater'?
I know audio professionals who are still using it.

Well I suppose I could track down a 2019 Mac Pro Intel.... I was kind of hoping to update to Apple Silicon, or I suppose I could jump over to a Windows box....

-C

Both viable options, IMHO.

Uli Plank wrote:Both viable options, IMHO.

I'm not quite sure if downgrading to a legacy system or (the horror!) switching to WIN can be called "viable". I feel cheated by Blackmagic. It's not ok to give away software for free/almost free (300.-) on one hand and just drop hardware that cost thousands without on the other hand because they are too niche. Don't sell niche hardware if you are not ready to support it.