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| Click here to select a new forum. | | Sonic MediaNet drivers | Posted by: eharmon on 2025-08-03 22:33:51
I recently picked up a Sonic MediaNet NuBus server board for a few dollars. Probably not very useful without a whole bundle of Sonic cards and clients, but I figured it'd be fun to play with for essentially free.
From what I've found, MediaNet has an interesting history that's spottingly documented. At its core, it provides extremely high speed (for the time) network storage for audio storage over FDDI or (conveniently) CDDI, meaning you can use standard twisted-pair ethernet cabling if you've got a CDDI card. Unlike the Mac's mid 90's ethernet networking, it advertised true 100Mbit speeds, and has a bunch of cool features like two onboard SCSI busses and directly serviced network requests bypassing the need to tie up the CPU while serving files.
Surprisingly, despite being a fairly popular setup for professional CD mastering, I can't find any copies of 68k SonicStudio or, more problematically the MediaNet software which I believe provides drivers for the card. (Unless someone knows what image format it is, the copy of SonicStudio 5.2.1 that seems to float around doesn't seem to be usable at all).
I'd love to document the card, anyone happen to have drivers? | Posted by: olePigeon on 2025-08-06 12:00:43
Sonic Studio is still in business. Maybe someone over there has what you need?
Sonic Studio downloads for versions 2.2.6, 5.3.2, and 5.4b10:
Manual for Sonic Studio:
| Posted by: eharmon on 2025-08-08 15:04:45
Sonic Studio is still in business. Maybe someone over there has what you need?
Sonic Studio downloads for versions 2.2.6, 5.3.2, and 5.4b10:
Manual for Sonic Studio:
I should have been clearer, sorry...I stumbled on those too but sadly they seem less "complete" and don't include the needed MediaNet configuration tooling. I thought they were just upgraders or needed dongles, but given that support page, maybe not! So perhaps the software is usable, just not the card.
You're right though...it's worth asking support as you never know... | Posted by: eharmon on 2025-08-23 18:02:00
I determined I just needed the latest version of ShrinkWrap (3.x) to unpack the 5.2.1 image. Fortunately it contains MediaNet 1.6.1!
I'll give it a go and make another post if there's anything interesting with this card. | Posted by: eharmon on 2025-09-01 14:07:47
I have discovered....so very many interesting things!
I'm going to do a full writeup highlighting the fascinating parts of this card and it's ecosystem, but in case I don't get to that for awhile, here's a link to a hidden subsection of my site with setup instructions in case anyone else comes across one of these: https://eharmon.net/retro/macintosh/sonic-medianet/lost-manual/ | | 1 |
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