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Mac OS Catalina compatibility thread


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I propose to start a thread on the Mac OS Catalina compatibility of various music software.

 

The Catalina version of Mac OS seems very disruptive for the music software; as of today i received alerts from Ableton, Steinberg, Native Instruments, Presonus and Roli asking to staying on Mojave, clearly more alerts of what i got for Mojave.

 

And then i know other software today is not yet compatible, like Sibelius (my old version 7), Nord software, and various other non musical things.

 

I may be worth to track the evolution of the subject in a dedicated thread.

What do you think ?

 

Maurizio

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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I will be following this thread as it develops. Glad it is here!

 

I recently updated to Mojave - 2014 Macbook Pro.

 

I purchased some "new" plugins and updated my DAW. Was a bit glitchy. I managed to return to High Sierra, have an external boot disk running High Sierra as well. It is only run offline

So I can stay here/return here if needed.

 

I've downloaded a copy of the install for Mojave.

 

Now it is a waiting game. If everything sorts out well I may move forward.

If not, I'll have to snag a cheap Billy G Box for Internet and disconnect my recording stuff.

 

Either way, I'll survive!!

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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No problems running UVIWorkstation & plugins from VILabs or Acoustic Samples on Catalina. I also opened Kontakt Player and loaded Canterbury Rhodes with no issue. Really don"t know what all the fuss is about â Catalina looks and acts exactly like Mojave which looked like High Sierra which looked like OSX at least as far back as Snow Leopard. Of course, I"m so old school I just disable almost all new features anyway!

 

I"m of the mind to avoid developers which might have been caught flat-footed by not being ready for Catalina, or 64-bit in general â an oversight that doesn"t bode well for the future â and considering there are many comparables out there, I"m not crazy about Native"s business model or their software enough to purchase any more of it.

____________________________________
Rod

Here for the gear.

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I"m of the mind to avoid developers which might have been caught flat-footed by not being ready for Catalina, or 64-bit in general â an oversight that doesn"t bode well for the future â and considering there are many comparables out there, I"m not crazy about Native"s business model or their software enough to purchase any more of it.

 

Agreed. I *am* grateful that many developers in our field have at least put it out there that their stuff isn't fully qualified yet. There are a few web sites for other developers I visited a few days after Catalina shipped who said *nothing* about their compatibility, or lack thereof. They had all summer to post *something.*

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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From Gearslutz: "RME Ensures Compatibility with New macOS Catalina

 

RME"s drivers are all written in-house and not outsourced to third parties, so customers can use latest operating systems without interruption or delay

 

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, October 3, 2019 â RME, German manufacturer of premium interfaces, announced today that its interfaces are already compatible with the latest macOS Catalina 10.15.x which was released this month. Since RME drivers are written in-house and not outsourced to third party developers, RME"s users are able to update their firmware immediately and continue working without interruption or delay."

 

Maurizio

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Catalina is particularly nasty because it finally turns off 32-bit compatibility, and a lot of developers are discovering just how much 32-bit code they have laying around that hasn't been cleaned up yet. I won't be upgrading to Catalina because I don't own any computers that are new enough to benefit from it; the last shipping rev of Mojave has been fantastic for me and I don't plan to move until I really must.

 

mike

 

Dr. Mike Metlay (PhD in nuclear physics, golly gosh) :D

Musician, Author, Editor, Educator, Impresario, Online Radio Guy, Cut-Rate Polymath, and Kindly Pedant

Editor-in-Chief, Bjooks ~ Author of SYNTH GEMS 1

 

clicky!:  more about me ~ my radio station (and my fam) ~ my local tribe ~ my day job ~ my bookmy music

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From what I'm gathering, the biggest problem with Catalina isn't the switch to all 64-bit...

 

https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/dr-macs-rants-raves/wait-install-macos-catalina/

 

I've often done the macOS upgrade a little while after it shipped, mostly because I have to wait for some developers to catch up now that I use some music apps and plug-ins (before that, I'd jump right in most of the time). Catalina seems to be worse as some developers still haven't even posted they're working on it, and reports like the one above. There have been numerous iOS 13 issues as well that Apple has raced to fix. Hopefully these are bumps in the road for Apple and OS updates aren't always going to be like this.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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Arturia just annonced the V Collection 7.1 update, that between other things bring Catalina compatibility.

My understanding is that VIs in the other version of the V collection are updated (i am right know updating my version 5).

 

Maurizio

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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From what I'm gathering, the biggest problem with Catalina isn't the switch to all 64-bit...

 

https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/dr-macs-rants-raves/wait-install-macos-catalina/

 

I've often done the macOS upgrade a little while after it shipped, mostly because I have to wait for some developers to catch up now that I use some music apps and plug-ins (before that, I'd jump right in most of the time). Catalina seems to be worse as some developers still haven't even posted they're working on it, and reports like the one above. There have been numerous iOS 13 issues as well that Apple has raced to fix. Hopefully these are bumps in the road for Apple and OS updates aren't always going to be like this.

 

I would be very careful on this kind of report, expecially with statements like "To be fair, I"ve also heard from a number of people who say their upgrade went smoothly and they"ve had no major issues with Catalina so far. But I suspect they are in the minority."

 

There are many reports on problems on Catalina, but i really found difficult to dig in and to discover what the fuss is about; there is a very long thread on MacRumor forums, with a lot of complaint and ciritics.

 

But i tried to get a grasp of what is really going on, i discovered that less than 5 posts on 10 pages spoke of first hand problems, and that many of them came from the usual misunderstanding; for exemple, every time

Apple make a big update, there reports that the new system is very slow; the point here is that after a major update MacOS rebuild the search indexes, and launch photo analysis daemons, and other tasks, so the machine is usually slow for a couple of days because it is busy. Problems with mail have been reported, but again they seems related to indexes rebuilding, but without any hard evidence in a direction or another.

You would expect a ma

 

There is a lot of people that make a business on bashing Apple, so every little piece of noise is amplified and it is very difficult to evaluate reality; this is not to say that there are no problems, of course, just be careful when reading around. By the way, the article pointed by the link was written before the latest update.

 

Anyway, music software incompatibilities give a lot of good reason to wait anyway :->

 

Maurizio

 

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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Maurizio - I get what you're saying. However, I know Dr. Mac personally, and he's an Apple fan, not a basher. He also does Mac support for people. The caveat here is that he's writing for average Mac users and so a little extra caution is warranted.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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Maurizio - I get what you're saying. However, I know Dr. Mac personally, and he's an Apple fan, not a basher. He also does Mac support for people. The caveat here is that he's writing for average Mac users and so a little extra caution is warranted.

 

I am sur he is. My problem is not with bashers, you usually reconise them and ignore the text.

 

My problem is more (in general, not with respect to what Dr. Mac says) that sometime a report is built with too little data points and without the context; so it happens that a catastrophic problem is reported, like for exemple "all mails deleted by Catalina upgrade", but without reporting enough technical context to understand what is really going on and what the problem is; sometime the problem just do not exists (or it is bad communication, like the slowness of the first days after an upgrade).

 

Anyway, to be honest, i stopped the rest of family from upgrading to Catalina, better wait a bit :->

 

Maurizio

 

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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Just another bit of information: the real problem with porting applications to Catalina is not the 32 to 64 bit by itself.

Writing portable code between 32 and 64 bit architecture is something that is part of best programming practices since the beginning of the 90s in C, Objective C and C++,

and not an issue at all in higher level languages like Python or Java or Swift.

 

The real problem here is that a number of old frameworks and APIs, declared obsolete a long time ago, but still supported in binaries up to Mojave,

have been completely dropped and not ported to 64 bit.

 

So, legacy code do not work anymore, and must be rewritten to use different modern frameworks; for this kind of code, this is vastly more expensive than just adjusting for 64 bits,

it may be equivalent to rewrite the affected module. If you happens to have a lot of legacy code in your applications, there may be a lot of work to do to be Catalina compatible.

 

Maurizio

Nord Wave 2, Nord Electro 6D 61,, Rameau upright,  Hammond Pro44H Melodica.

Too many Arturia, NI and AAS plugins

http://www.barbogio.org/

 

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Sweetwater's macOS 10.15 Catalina Compatibility List

 

This list that Sweetwater does for every macOS update is a good reference with links to each manufacturer. It's also amazing to see how many of them still say, "No statement yet, stay tuned." :rolleyes:

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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Sweetwater's macOS 10.15 Catalina Compatibility List

 

This list that Sweetwater does for every macOS update is a good reference with links to each manufacturer. It's also amazing to see how many of them still say, "No statement yet, stay tuned." :rolleyes:

As every year.

 

The previous list wasn't fully cleared for Mojave until well into 2019, with a number of vendors posting lists that included a lot of software that just died and wouldn't be updated (like killing ALL v9 and previous Waves plug-ins, permanently).

 

Most of my plug-in vendors came over some time in December last time, though. Except Waves 9 stuff. :-/ Curious to see how much longer it will take, this time around.

"The Angels of Libra are in the European vanguard of the [retro soul] movement" (Bill Buckley, Soul and Jazz and Funk)

The Drawbars | off jazz organ trio

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I received notification from Voxengo that all of their plugins that were released prior to June 2019 are Catalina compliant.

Of the newer plugins, they have 4 updated for use with Catalina and are working on the rest.

 

Still using High Sierra here.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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Toontrack stuff that's already installed will work.

 

At this point, only Beatstation and EZmix 1 installers will not work, however.

 

https://www.toontrack.com/forums/topic/macos-x-10-15-catalina/

"The Angels of Libra are in the European vanguard of the [retro soul] movement" (Bill Buckley, Soul and Jazz and Funk)

The Drawbars | off jazz organ trio

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Just another bit of information: the real problem with porting applications to Catalina is not the 32 to 64 bit by itself.

Writing portable code between 32 and 64 bit architecture is something that is part of best programming practices since the beginning of the 90s in C, Objective C and C++,

and not an issue at all in higher level languages like Python or Java or Swift.

 

The real problem here is that a number of old frameworks and APIs, declared obsolete a long time ago, but still supported in binaries up to Mojave,

have been completely dropped and not ported to 64 bit.

 

So, legacy code do not work anymore, and must be rewritten to use different modern frameworks; for this kind of code, this is vastly more expensive than just adjusting for 64 bits,

it may be equivalent to rewrite the affected module. If you happens to have a lot of legacy code in your applications, there may be a lot of work to do to be Catalina compatible.

 

Maurizio

 

This is a better stated version of what I said above. Thank you, Maurizio!

 

mike

 

 

Dr. Mike Metlay (PhD in nuclear physics, golly gosh) :D

Musician, Author, Editor, Educator, Impresario, Online Radio Guy, Cut-Rate Polymath, and Kindly Pedant

Editor-in-Chief, Bjooks ~ Author of SYNTH GEMS 1

 

clicky!:  more about me ~ my radio station (and my fam) ~ my local tribe ~ my day job ~ my bookmy music

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GForce Software has been updating M-Tron Pro to add scalable UI, among other things, but they're still stating that Catalina support is forthcoming but not quite here yet.

 

Dr. Mike Metlay (PhD in nuclear physics, golly gosh) :D

Musician, Author, Editor, Educator, Impresario, Online Radio Guy, Cut-Rate Polymath, and Kindly Pedant

Editor-in-Chief, Bjooks ~ Author of SYNTH GEMS 1

 

clicky!:  more about me ~ my radio station (and my fam) ~ my local tribe ~ my day job ~ my bookmy music

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay, just stumbled into this forum from Keyboard Corner.

 

Let me add to the list my experiences so far with Catalina:

The following all work for me on a 2018 Mac Mini running Catalina (both as stated by the companies, and my own use/testing)

 

  • Gig Performer 3.6
  • Kontakt 6 and related VSTs
  • Reaktor 6 and related VSTs
  • Native Access
  • Arturia Software Center
  • Arturia V-Collection 6 and 7
  • iKMultimedia Authorization Center
  • iKMultimedia T-Racks and T-Racks 5 Custom Shop
  • PianoTeq 6
  • BlueCat Audio Chorus and Phaser Plug Ins
  • Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver 2.02
  • FocusRite 18i20 3rd Gen

 

 

 

 

David

Gig Rig:Casio Privia PX-5S | Yamaha MODX+ 6 | MacBook Pro 14" M1| Mainstage

 

 

 

 

 

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