I decided to throw my hat into the ring yet again into running EW Play 6 through CrossGridder (R.I.P.) on my 2017 iMac, and while I did manage to get it working, the biggest issue I'm having as of late is just the lack of a proper AISO driver to replace the awful, built-in Directsound driver.

I keep hearing about wineAISO and jack, and all that stuff but a lot of the more recent info on it is more inline with Linux methods as opposed to MacOS. I once got the FL Studio AISO driver working to some decent results, but I felt like there was a better way than butchering a software install just for it's audio drivers.

Is there a cohesive or better way to get even better audio out of CrossOver/wine without needing to lose my mind?! lol

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, and I look forward to conversing with you all on the matter!

 

You don't. You were asking about Crossgridder yesterday and have run into the reason why I rarely used that configuration. I got it working fine, but latency and lag make it terrible on my Intel Mac. Maybe a much faster ARM Mac can deliver good performance, but that was not my experience. I ended up just putting a win10 laptop connected via ethernet cable and using the pc as a plugin server.

Some people have suggested that Parallels Desktop works ok, and of course you can use Bootcamp if you want to create a Windows partition on a disk and boot Windows directly.

Crossgridder works but for me it is more of a proof-of-concept than a useful mixing setup. A cheap laptop will run quite a bit of plugins using it as a DSP server. Logic corrects the latency without any issue. I already had the PC laptop, but I probably wouldn't give someone more than $100 or $150 for it used. You do not need a supercomputer to do this. It's not even running a DAW software.

 

I'm just beginning to give up on CrossGridder for how atrocious trying to get plugins working to begin with. Tried throwing EW Play 6 at it, keeps crashing the AudioGridder server program- thinking it's just unique to EW Play, I try throwing Orange Vocoder IV at it- still crashes. What a mess.

I'll just wait to buy Fab Four since they've apparently lowered the price on it to like $79 USD. I think it's for valentine's day, maybe I'll grab it for another sale or something.

 

Last edited: Feb 4, 2026