Still No OS X Mavericks Driver for the EIE Pro

Last year, when Apple released OS X Mountain Lion, I posted about it. It took 2 weeks for them to get compatible drivers released. This year, with the release of OS X Mavericks, they’ve done it again.

Mavericks was released on October 22. As of this writing, I’ve been waiting 49 days for a driver. Of course, I learned my lesson from last year. I didn’t upgrade to Mavericks and have been waiting for an official driver.

A few weeks after Mavericks was released, a user on the GetSatisfaction forum figured out a work-around to install the driver in Mavericks. Apparently the problem is an issue with the package signature. Now I’m not a software developer, but from what I’ve heard this isn’t a huge problem to fix. As it is, the OS won’t install it.

So why the delay? Akai is short on answers. But one of the forum posters has done some digging and all the brands owned by their parent company InMusic (Akai, M-Audio, Alesis, Alto Professional, Ion, MixMeister, Numark, and Sonivox) are suffering driver lags. There’s only one customer support rep dealing with all the people complaining on the forum and he has no new information. They’ve left him to take the heat. The best he was able to do was refer people to the (unofficial and unsupported) work-around. The smart money says that all of InMusic’s departments are cheaply outsourced and strained.

Well, I got tired of waiting and decided to risk the work around. I uninstalled the driver, backed up, upgraded to Mavericks, and performed the driver work-around. It mostly works. I can monitor and record with the interface and the OS sees my external drives on the USB hub. However, the sound card can’t be used as a system sound output device. This is OK for me, but some may not like that compromise.

If you can live without system sound functionality, you can upgrade to Mavericks and use the workaround below.

Step 1: Download the latest driver from here.

Step 2: Unzip the driver and mount the enclosed DMG.

Step 3: Right-click on the “Akai EIE Pro 2.2..5.app” bundle and select “Show Package Contents”.

Step 4: Navigate to “/Contents/Resources/Akai EIE Pro_2.2.5.pkg” and run it.

Step 5: Follow the onscreen directions as usual.

I hope this helps someone. This is the last time I’m putting up with this. Focusrite just got a new customer.