I have a pretty old but high quality microphone pre-amplifier. I really want to keep it running properly and have various old macs that can communicate with it perfectly well. But it's control panel is 32 bit so I have to use Mojave or older and I'd prefer to have a more modern version of MacOS as my daily driver and to run more current DAW software The hardware is called the Liquid 4 Pre made by Focusrite. I'm exploring the possibility of using a 32 bit capable VM such as Mojave (it could be Windows but I'm much more familiar with Macs) to just run this control panel - which allows me to quickly change settings on the hardware and store various configs. Doing it manually is a PITA. The 4 Pre is not an audio interface - it's connected via ADAT to my RME interface and that's got current 64 bit drivers that work with Big Sur and Monterey. The problem is that the 32 bit control panel connects to the Liquid 4 Pre via ethernet. When booted into Mojave bare metal I would manually set the 4 Pre to have an IP address of e.g. 10.0.0.10 and manually set my Mac's ethernet to be 10.0.0.5, both with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. The control panel then scans the network, finds the device and then any changes I make in software change the settings in hardware and vice versa. In theory the Liquid 4 Pre should also work via DHCP, but in fifteen odd year I've never got it to work - while setting a manual IP address on a dedicated NIC has been pretty reliable. So the first question is, "Is it theoretically possible to get this to work?" And second, if so, what's the best way of going about it? I've tried various settings, for example, switching off my other NICs, and setting the host manually to 10.0.0.4, the guest to 10.0.0.5 (the 4 Pre is looking for 10.0.0.5 to connect to the software) and the 4 Pre to 10.0.0.10 - and been through the various modes in Parallels. Having experimented with trial and error for hours it would take almost as long to list everything I've tried, so I thought it better to ask here how it SHOULD be done, if possible? Any further info I can add just ask away! Many thanks for reading this far. J
Actually turned out to be pretty simple as soon as I switched to using an old DHCP router instead of trying to make a direct connection between host and guest and the Focusrite Liquid 4 Pre. I set the router to 10.0.0.1 and with bridged ethernet selected in Parallels my host got 10.0.0.2, the guest got 10.0.0.3 and the Liquid 4 Pre 10.0.0.5 and was discovered immediately with both Windows 10 and Mojave versions of the Liquid Control control panel software. That said I would really like to know how or if it's possible to bypass using the router using Parallel's virtual DHCP server/router and how to go about setting that up. But I'm very happy that a "junk" router I got as a freebie from an ISP three houses ago, means my lovely old audio hardware (which originally cost about £1000.00 and is "as new") has a whole new lease of life. Thanks
