Since i bought my OP-1 second-hand a few months back i’ve been having problems with getting the drive to show up on my Macs. I e-mailed TE and their instant reaction was to totally ignore all the details i had provided in my support request, and instead tell me i needed to change a perfectly good DSP board, working fine in all other respects (USB MIDI, USB AUDIO, charging etc), at whatever cost they choose to set, and have to send the device to Germany at my expense as well. As this was obviously a completely unacceptable solution to a SOFTWARE issue (i’ll explain this later), i decided to dig in and see what i could discover.
First off, the problem mounting the drive started when i loaded r.243 onto the device. Before that it was running r.235 if i remember correctly. This was on a Macbook Pro 2012 running OSX 10.12. The drive would not mount no matter how long i waited. So i tried an old Win XP netbook (ASUS eeePC) to see if i could get it working there and it mounted just fine. OK, weird and unexpected situation. So i start mucking about with the firmware, reloading r.235 gets my drive back on the Macbook. I found that going up to r.242 works. So i’ve left the OP there.
Now, today i try hooking the OP up to my desktop (Mac Mini 2012), running OSX 10.11. It doesn’t show up as a disk. Frustrating situation. I don’t feel like changing firmware again, but a thought pops into my head. Plug it in to the Macbook with 10.12, and it works fine… Hmm, how to see if the computer hardware is the issue? I have a backup of all my computers on disk, so following a hunch i boot the Mac Mini off of my Macbook 10.12 backup, hook up the OP-1 and… it shows up…
Yes, that’s right. Most of the problems people have been having with this, and TE’s solution of getting people to send back their devices for part replacement at massive cost, is due to a SOFTWARE INCOMPATIBILITY ISSUE, nothing to do with DSP boards and USB transceivers and whatever other utter load of rubbish TE keep telling people. They are too incompetent to discover that their firmware updates invalidate compatibility with older OSX versions, causing the drive not to mount. I would take a wild guess that they are changing YAFFS versions when they update the bootloader, and this is causing the problem, and probably why Windows XP works fine with all of them, as that part of the code won’t be changing from version to version. Apple made a pretty significant change to the file system between 10.12 and 10.14, so the latest YAFFS is bound to reflect that, but sadly seems to break compatibility. Not saying this is definitely the cause, but it’s pretty likely.
Unbelieveable.
Anyway, for anyone reading this in the future and possibly having the same issue, i hope this is of some help, and that you can trace a working setup and get on with your life without putting more money in TE’s pocket for no good reason.