Back at the Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar launch event here I won a copy of Storm Music Studio. At the time the copy I won was version 1.5, but I got a free upgrade to 2.0 (thanks Arturia!). I’m not particularly musical so I don’t use it all that often, but I do enjoy having a play now and then.
Recently I went to fire it up to have a bit of a play but after it launched it displayed a nasty dialog box informing me that the sound device was in use: not much good for a music application. No amount of clicking on the settings to choose the sound device would help, so what was I to do?
As this was the first time I’d launched Storm under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and knowing that Storm is written in Java I thought there might be a chance I could fix this problem. It seemed that some change in Apple’s JVM in Mac OS X had caused Storm to get somewhat confused about my audio devices. There was no update available from Arturia that might fix the issue, or any documentation that I could find on it. Clearly I was in this alone.
A few months ago around the release of Storm 3, I had downloaded the demo to see what was different. I never actually got around to installing the demo, but there it was sitting in my downloads folder just waiting to be installed. After extracting and installing the Storm 3 demo, I checked that it did indeed work with Tiger. There were no problems to be seen. Looking at the about box of the two applications I noticed that Storm 3 was using Java 1.4.2, while Storm 2 was using Java 1.3.1. The obvious thing to do was to try and get Storm 2.0 to use Java 1.4.2 and see what happened.
To do this, I cracked open Storm 2’s application (Show Package Contents from the contextual menu) and edited its Info.plist file to add the following section:
<key>Java</key>
<dict>
<key>ClassPath</key>
<array>
<string>$JAVAROOT/classes.jar</string>
<string>$JAVAROOT/look.jar</string>
<string>$JAVAROOT/shlook.jar</string>
</array>
<key>JVMVersion</key>
<string>1.4+</string>
<key>MainClass</key>
<string>storm.application.Application</string>
</dict>
Success! After this quick modification Storm 2 launched without complaint and was ready to go making music as always.
As an aside, there’s something interesting going on here though. I went to revert Storm 2.0 back to it’s broken state so I could get a screenshot of the error message to place above but even after removing the Java section, Storm continued to work correctly. Weird, but at least I’ve got it back now.