Posts Tagged zoom r16

Zoom R16 – Audio Recorder/Interface/Controller – Working in OS X 10.6

Posted by Abe in Music on December 3, 2009

I own a Zoom R16 Audio Recorder / Interface / Controller. I love the product as it is extremely portable. I use it for recording live programs and music. I was happy with the output and performance I got from the entry level recorder. The drivers worked well on Windows XP machine. I installed Cubase LE 4 and checked the performance of the interface and controller. They were flawless.

However the real problem was when I had to use my Macbook running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. The drivers were simply not working. I was pretty unhappy about the drivers not working on Snow Leopard. I did some googling and found few posts which mentioned they have the drivers working fine.

Unfortunately as mentioned by them I was not able to install my drivers for Snow Leopard. Yesterday night I sat to hack and see if I can make it work for Show Leopard. Finally after a little hacking I found a way to fix the issue.

Here is how I got it.

  1. First I downloaded the latest driver that was available on the Zoom.co.jp website.
  2. Then I extracted the contents of the drivers to a folder. After little more digging I could find an archive within the package which has got the kext required to run the audio interface.
  3. I used kext helper to install the driver.
  4. After installing the driver using kext help I restarted the machine.
  5. I was able to see my “Zoom R16 Driver”
It perfectly worked on Cubase LE 4. However I was not able to make them work with Ardour and at the moment I didnt check any other DAWs. Hope this will be an interim solution to people who are desperate to make the Zoom R16 work on Snow Leopard.
Update:
Detailed Steps to get your stuff work (assuming you have downloaded the driver from Zoom website )
1. Extract R16_driver_mac.zip to a folder.
2. You will see Zoom R16Driver.pkg
3. Right-click on the package and click on “Show package contents”. Copy the contents folder to your desired path.
4. Open “Contents” folder and you will find Archive.pax.gz
5. Extract Archive.pax.gz and there you will find two folders System and Library. You have to use Kext helper to install the driver you will find on System folder and copy all files in the library to the same path in your user directory (warning: dont overwrite folders, just copy individual files to the respective folders.)
6. You might need to restart your system and you should find “Zoom R16 Driver” under your sound settings.
Hope this helps.
Latest Update (29-12-2009):
I could see the latest version of drivers for Mac 10.6 (snow leopard running on 32 bit mode, however 64-bit is not yet supported). I hope you need not worry about the hacks available in the blogs. Happy mixing!

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