10.6.4 USB Pro Speakers (G4 Cube) don't work on Macbook Pro

Only another me-too I'm afraid. I was using G4 Cube speakers quite happily on my new Intel iMac till, yep, you guessed it, I upgraded to 10.6.4 THIS MORNING!! They did carry on working for a few hours, but now, nothing. Like all you other folks, they show up fine in the Sound preference pane, but nought comes out of 'em. Plug 'em into my G3 iBook running 10.4 and they work fine. So it's deffo not the speakers. Over to you Apple. 😟

Same problem... does anyone have fixed this???.... the only thing o do (i guess) is to go back to 10.6.3 and use my little speakers again. Unless apple release a fix or anyone of you figure out how to make it work.

Please... anoyone!?

+1, usb speaker (g4 cube) no workie on new MBP on 10.64 ...

Should you all should be banding together and letting Apple know this.

Apple Bug Report

or

MacOS X Feedback

I took my 17 inch Intel based Macbook to the Applestore Genius bar yesterday with my USB cube speakers. After taking a look the generous technician informed me that the speakers are broken since he could listen to the earphone output from the speaker control box, but no sound emerged from the speakers. I took the speakers home and plugged in to my Mac now running with the bootable disc with OSX 10.6.3. Lo and behold the speaker works. I think it is time Apple got around to fix the kernel issue. How about it apple? In the meantime please educate your geniuses.
JTPandian

It must be easy for Apple to fix this.

02/10/2010 16:33:33 kernel Couldn't alloc class "AppleUSBTrinityAudioDevice"
02/10/2010 16:34:50 kernel Couldn't alloc class "AppleUSBTrinityAudioDevice"

Apparently that is missing.
Did the Apple bug report.
So far Apple remains as silent as my nice speakers.

rick

I logged a bug on this and apple responded with this:

"Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended based on the following information:

Sorry, these speakers are only officially supported on the G4 Cube, the original hardware configuration."

Needless to say this is the lamest thing I have ever heard. I don't want to landfill these speakers, I liked them.

The +good news+ is that Apple releases its USB audio driver source code as a part of its opensource commitments so – at a quick glance – all the details required to drive their G4 Cube speakers (and the iSub, FWIW) are in the public domain. However, the +bad news+ is that between AppleUSBAudio-268.4.1 (MacOS X 10.6.3) and AppleUSBAudio-273.4.1 (MacOS X 10.6.4) all supporting code for these two devices appears to have been systematically removed.

To make it clear: Apple will, almost certainly, NEVER restore support for these speakers. This is not a bug; the required software is simply not in their driver anymore. The only options going forward are to continue using the 10.6.3 version of AppleUSBAudio indefinitely, or for some kindly, clever soul to write a third-party driver based off the contents of their code and release it for the benefit of the community.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
robbie,

+Caveat to my above post: I am not a developer in any sense of the word when it comes to MacOS X internals, so I'd be more than happy to be told that I've misinterpreted the code. I'm basing my comments on the complete removal of the AppleUSBTrinityAudioDevice – which contains specific references to "G4 Cube Speakers" – as well as the redaction of seemingly supporting lines from other parts of the driver.+

…now listening to my G4 Cube Apple Pro speakers under 10.6.5.

Trashing the audio preferences had no effect, so I tried to boot the mini from the 10.6.2 install disk to prove the malfunction really is due to the upgrade to 10.6.4 (or was it 10.6.3 when they stopped working?). I couldn't boot from the install disk, so I installed 10.6.2 on an external firewire drive.

The speakers worked under 10.6.2 running on the external drive and when I rebooted to 10.6.5 on the mini's internal drive they continued to work !

When not typing I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

great... my G4 Cube Apple Pro speakers, which worked perfectly well under 10.6.4, do not make one peep under 10.6.5...

additionally, i have the same effect as Pandian: headphones work just fine...

Hi,

I'm working on seeing if I can add back the device support for the USB Cube Speakers. Interesintly removing the code for these (codename Trinity) device they've also removed all the iSub code too.

Also, as of today they seem to have un-opensourced AppleUSBAudio. Any coincidence?

opensource@apple.com have confirmed that the driver is no longer open source. Thanks Apple.

I now have working speakers again, by retrieving an older version of /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext from a 10.6.2 machine to /System/Library/Extensions/

If you copied it not being root you need to set the owner right (terminal), perhaps best to do that anyway:

$ sudo bash
# cd /System/Library/Extensions/
# chown -R root:wheel /Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext
# kextload AppleUSBAudio.kext

On the kextload my speakers started working. No reboot becessary, even.

Thanks Apple. Not.