Propellerhead Software

ReBirth 2.0.1 System Requirements Mac OS

Power Macintosh through early Quicksilver Towers. Powerbooks from Wallstreet to Rev A Titanium & early Clamshell iBooks.
66 MHz 68030 through 800Mhz G4. Must Run MacOS 8 or 9 Natively. More info : Mac OS 8 and 9: Compatibility With Macintosh Computers
16 MB of RAM
CD-ROM drive
Mac OS 7.5.3 or later
256 color monitor (or better), 640x480 or larger
16 bit audio, Apple Sound Manager 3.2.1, or later MIDI interface OMS 2.2 or later, included on ReBirth CD-ROM.

Note: ReBirth 2.0.1 does not run on Mac OS X, but it may run in the Classic environment of Mac OS X using built-in sound outputs. 3rd Party Audio Interfaces may not be supported with ReBirth running the OS X Classic Environment. OMS and all MIDI communication are also disabled in the OS X Classic Environment.

I am trying to install ReBirth 2.0.1 (upgrade from 1.5) and I'm requested to insert the 1.5 CD for authentication. I do that and it doesn't work?

This is a problem with ReBirth and the CD driver in Mac OS 9. The problem is that a CD has to be inserted before ReBirth is launched in order to be detected by ReBirth. This is fine in everyday operations, but it's a problem when upgrading.

There's the old difficult way of fixing this problem which follows the easy solution:

Download, Burn and Install the full version of ReBirth 2.0.1. Do not follow the upgrade process, but keep your old CD-ROMs as mementos.

Or what you need to do is to use the old Apple CD driver the one time that you will perform the update. If you have a way of getting the old driver from a pre-Mac OS 9 Mac, that's great. If you can't get a hold of it, then please mail support and we'll send the driver to you.

Please do as follows:

1. Take the old driver called Apple CD/DVD driver and rename it to "Apple
old CD/DVD driver".
2. Put this driver in the System Folder -> Extensions folder.
3. Open the Extension manager (it's in the Control Panels folder).
4. Scroll down to the Extensions Folder section and Disable the current CD driver called "Apple CD/DVD Driver" and activate the one you just added (the old driver).
5. Restart your computer.
6. Perform the upgrade routine.
7. Open the Extensions Manager again.
8. Now, disable the old driver and enable the Mac OS 9 CD driver.
9. After restarting your computer again, you can remove the old driver from the extensions folder. Keeping it can be a good idea though if you encounter other CD-related problems.

Audio card drivers - Mac OS 9 (and earlier)

Under Mac OS 9 there are two ways you can play back audio:

- Using the Sound Manager
- Using ASIO

The Sound Manager is a set of software routines in the Mac OS. These routines take care of everything related to sound. If you are using the internal audio on your Macintosh computer you are using the Sound Manager, it is built into the system.
One specific character of the Sound Manager is its ability to mix audio from several applications. This means that when you run ReBirth, you can also run other Sound Manager compatible applications at the same time, and they will all sound.

There are a rare few Mac audio cards that play back via the Sound Manager. If you have an audio card for your Macintosh, we strongly recommend you to try and find an ASIO driver for it instead of using a Sound Manager driver. This will give you higher reliability and performance.

An audio card with an ASIO driver is your best option if it is available. ASIO does not guarantee low latency, but it allows for it if the audio card designers take advantage of its possibilities. Using a card via an ASIO driver can give latency figures as low as 3ms. When you use ASIO, only one program at a time can access the card.

Note: to use ASIO you need to add an ASIO driver file to the ASIO Drivers folder in your Reason folder. If several program take advantage of ASIO this means you will have to duplicate this driver to each program's ASIO Driver folder.

More information about ASIO can be found on Steinberg Media Technologies' web pages.

ReBirth won't play through my audio card, what's wrong?

ReBirth only supports Sound Manager for the Mac and this means that ReBirth can only use cards that have a Sound Manager driver (except the Digidesign Sound Manager driver that doesn't seem to work). Other cards, e.g. AudioMedia cannot be used.

However, if you run ReBirth in ReWire mode with a ReWire host application you can play the ReBirth you can take advantage of any audio card that has ASIO drivers. Please consult your audio cards documentation on how to route the sound manager audio through the card.

Alert: "Out of Memory"

This alert appears if you're short of Memory.

1. Quit all running programs that you don't currently use.
2. If this alert still appears, you should assign more memory to the application that generates this alert when started. Please check your computer documentation to learn how to allocate memory to a program.