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Comment by anonova | Hacker News Reader

Yep, Native Instruments (on that list) sent out an explicit email saying not to update: https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

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With good reason, too. A good portion of the Native Instrument software packages won't install because the installers themselves rely on 32-bit helpers. A savvy technical user can work around it by unpacking and excising the problematic portions from the installer scripts.

On the plus side, I've been running Kontakt 5 along with lots of other audio software since 10.15 beta 3 every day and most everything is working alright.

Some other observations:

• Pro Tools' QuickTime video plug-in prevents it from launching because it's a 32-bit only subprocess meant to interact with the now-defunct QuickTime framework. You can delete the plug-in from the application bundle and it will proceed and seems to be working normally.

• EastWest has a nasty crash in PLAY 6 that can be worked around temporarily by removing their internal word builder plug-in.

• Pretty much every iZotope plug-in as of September had a 32-bit non-pkg installer. The software works fine if you copy all the relevant parts from an install on another computer.

• MOTU hardware drivers for anything but the latest Pro Audio line won't work as the drivers are 32-bit at the moment (MIDI interfaces, CueMix-based audio interfaces).

Waves sent one out last month as well. Par for the course really. Audio pros are some of the most distrustful users w.r.t updates because they've been burned so many times.

Another way of looking at that might be, developer of pro audio apps are notoriously bad at preparing their apps for new OS releases.

That's fair. Pro Tools crashing during a session has been a meme for awhile, despite it being pretty stable for the last 5-ish years.

But keep in mind these companies are usually pretty small, a lot of sole-proprietors out there, and their revenue comes from new products/sales not maintaining projects. So there's logistical and incentive problems in deploying fixes quickly.

As a former developer of pro audio apps at Native Instruments, sometimes it's just that the first version of macOS updates has bugs that suddenly causes crashes in your lower level OS calls or unexplained latency. If something like this happens, users mostly blame the audio devs and not Apple. So, if you don't want to ruin your reputation, you better warn, test, wait, hope and fix (maybe not in that order).

I think that's unfair to audio developers. You're asking for a real-time scenario from an obvious not real-time OS. Dropping audio is a lot more obvious than dropping video frames. Audio also deals with /a lot/ of plugins both hardware and software--many paid (years ago and now abandoned). Most people I know with an audio setup are very sensitive to physical changes due to subtle problems.

I also think it's unrealistic for large applications to be 100% ready on day one. It's not like Apple has a GM ready weeks ago. Betas are known to change and nobody really knew when Catalina would ship (many people are surprised they're shipping what they have).

Audio software is very hard to get right and it's a relatively low margin business. Asking them to track new OS releases on day one is just not realistic, especially when Apple has a pretty bad track record on stability and maturity of x.0 releases of macOS.

Could be, but when the new OS updates every 12 months they can either dedicate a whole chunk of their time updating to the new version, or make it work good on a version that's still going to be supported for 3 or 4 years so they can focus on bug fixes and updates.

Just because Apple can bump out a new OS version once a year doesn't mind these app developers have the same bandwidth to keep up the chase. They have plenty of other priorities.

And why would they care to improve when they know their user base will let them get away with it and even side with them against Apple ? Reposting a comment I left elsewhere in the thread :

For the most part, it's not a technical issue at all but a cultural one : pro audio users are notoriously, almost pathologically conservative when it comes to software upgrades.

You'll find plenty of threads on forums like Gearslutz, asking for tips on how to downgrade brand new Macs to an older version of macOS that doesn't even support their hardware. Or 2019 threads asking if it's now safe to upgrade to High Sierra. They're typically 2-3 versions behind. Why ? Older is just safer, better in their worldview.

In that context, audio developers know they have customers on their side against "evil Apple that's always breaking everything for no benefit", and they get away with emails that read like Apple just unexpectedly dropped a bomb on them without notice, and it'll take them 6-12 months to get ready, like WWDC and 3-4 months of developer betas never happened.

It's amusing to read your post because Apple seem to be touted as the OS for audio people.

I wonder what MacOS has that Windows doesn't(which is a lot more backward compatible) that makes audio people stick with them.

Audio people have been moving away from Apple over the past few years specifically because of show-stopping bugs introduced by new versions of the OS. This really never happens in Windows now and it's become more and more appealing to switch.

Maybe on Windows 7, because Windows 10 does whatever it wants if connected to the internet.

All mainstream OSes are moving to an unsustainable release cycle.

macOS has had a reliable low-latency audio API for years, when on Windows you had to resort to third party hacks like ASIO.

For years it has also had things like Audio Midi Setup, which lets you set up aggregate virtual audio interfaces from physical ones, dealing with latency compensation etc. Or MIDI over Bluetooth. All of that out the box. It just feels it's been designed with pro audio in mind, compared to Windows.

OS X's CoreAudio is still an incredibly well-designed technical architecture, designed by a team who really understood digital clocking from a hardware perspective and the importance of low-latency kernel support. It's still kind of amazing to me that it was essentially fully baked by 2002-2003. On Windows there's now WASAPI Event, which has a similar architecture, but for the longest time third-parties had to step in with a third party solution (ASIO) because the OS support wasn't there (and ASIO really only solves a subset of the problems CoreAudio solves). I'm frustrated by how little attention the driver and documentation side of things has gotten from Apple since then, but for some specialized requirements the underlying architecture is still just fantastic.

Aside from the other replies you’ve already received that are spot on, macOS has also been consistently good at isolating the audio ports from coil noise / interference from the other electrical signals on both laptops and desktops. While “pro” audio folks are likely to be using an external audio interface anyway, having an audio jack that doesn’t garble the sound is one of many ways that Apple hardware engineers have been attentive to audio.

As a MacOS audio developer who supports legacy machines to this day, there's some truth to what you say but you're glossing over important realities: Apple has a long-standing pattern of revising developer tools to throw away support for working machines, and then requiring you to use their newest developer tools for current development.

It's a technical issue. It's a bear to support older systems from newer machines. (it's a lot easier to support current stuff from dawn-of-time old systems! I keep an antique laptop to code on which allows me to support EVERYTHING all the way back to PPC Macs. Which I do support)

My choices of what I choose to buy (in Apple hardware) or even CAN buy are conditioned very much by this reality. I'll get stuff if there's a fighting chance I can build a working ecosystem on it. I'll be willing to do things like ditch Logic and switch to Reaper, and I'll be well within my rights to tell users 'this is what I can offer, and this is what I cannot'.

Because Apple is not automatically my ally. It can be my adversary, even when I'm doing its bidding (I was fairly early in porting my entire product line to 64-bit when few others bothered. Apple literally called me and offered to help me do this, so I told 'em I'd already done it three months before. I did NOT tell them that I continued to support PPC machines or maintained a time capsule dev machine as the only way to develop for a large range of cheaply, easily available hardware)

Users have every right to side with me against Apple when I'm an open source developer letting them do professional-quality audio work on computers costing only a few hundred dollars, and/or letting them continue to use known-good and predictable equipment, and Apple is locked in to a course of action requiring it to churn its userbase at whatever cost to the userbase.

I totally get Apple's motivation here, but it doesn't serve my customers.

Or you could see it as your OS breaking lots of software you depend on and then telling you tough luck.

As a user I only see "OS upgraded -> stuff broken". I'll blame the OS for that. All finger pointing and shoulda/coulda/woulda is not magically going to unbreak things,rolling back the upgrade will.

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