Hah they should've done what SoundToys did. Put out a press release that basically says 'Well our plugins seem to work but we're still testing so dont take this as a good to go just yet'.


BTW - Logic isn't $200 for life. When 11.0 comes out, you're paying another $200 for the update.

I've got a user who's reporting Big Sur troubles: namely, he's got my plugins (which are generic interface AUs being run in Logic) instantiating, but he's not able to manipulate the sliders under Big Sur.

This is of course a bit of a challenge for me as my plugins don't DRAW their interfaces: much like generic VSTs, they communicate to the DAW which then draws the controls in whatever way it pleases.

I'm seeing a lot of 'everything is fine!' reports regarding many plugins with much more challenging hosting requirements than mine. Is anybody experiencing failure on Big Sur in a situation where they're turning off the GUI and trying to run the plugins directly? I think AULab used to be able to do that? I'm understandably real curious if Apple managed to break fundamental things about CoreAudio…

So you know that for sure?
Logic X came out in 2015 - all the upgrades have been free so far.
So "if" there is an update 5 years of free upgrades is still hard to beat.
Given Apples past record on Logic I would be surprised of they charge for the next version. Apple uses hardware to give out cheap or free software.
My first version of Logic that I purchased (2003) was a lot more that $200 - so at this point I way ahead of the curve

Its the way its always been. Logic Pro X came out in 2013 actually. All of the updates so far have been for Logic Pro 10.. When 11 comes out, this isn't an 'update' this is an 'upgrade'. Users paid for X when it came out, Logic 9 users were not given the upgrade for free. Final Cut Pro users never get new versions free, they pay for those as well. If by some miracle its free this time, Apple changed their normal policy. They don't give out new versions of anything unless its the free apps that come with the Mac like Pages, Numbers, etc.. Their "professional" software is a paid upgrade when new versions come out just like everyone else does (except Steinberg who like to charge people for .5 updates from time to time).

Ive heard its like pulling teeth getting a refund/exchange with Apple even if you happen to buy something and they release the new version the very next day.

Chris you're right.

I switched and can't use your plugins which is a shame since I basically use them for everything I do.

The sliders won't work which p**s me off because I use purest gain on everything I gaine stage.

There has been some crackling problems that I didn't have previously where I basically boot up in order to offset and bring up what I saved that was working before things got mess up.

I have an older audio interface so I don't know if that's the problem even though I got new drivers for it.

It's a Mac pro trash can so it can't really take advantage of the power of the new chips that are coming out on the new machines.

Outside of that the operating system itself seems to be pretty solid and most plugins are working.

Even though Apple are notorious for causing incompatibility problems, an example is not being able to use the iPads with older machines (the remote control thingy I forgot what it's called) like mine unless you go into console/terminal because of what I presume to be greed because there seems to be no logical reason for it and it can be done this way; they seem to be heading in the right direction at least when it comes to computational power.

It's kind of a shame that there's no guys like you on the computer hardware front that can give Apple a run for their buck by introducing a new and improved hardware software solution now that the computers we all use to a large extent are stuck on a technological framework that was developed in the 1950s. (I don't see why technically a language that is more efficient than C (doing assembly from scratch with a whole new hardware architecture))coupled with new software can't be created based on some of the current academic papers I'm reading; even though it's hard it would be worth it. The "supercomputers" are not as efficient as our brains and I don't see why humans couldn't engineer something like that if they really wanted to)))

Now that Apple is putting their R&D muscle and ridiculously grotesque economic resources on the microchip side of things; things might get interesting; maybe their iToy integration with machines you actually do work on might not be that bad......

My knowledge on this area of tech is extremely limited, so cut me some slack here if I'm totally off.

I believe Big Sur deprecates the Cocoa API for native object-oriented application interfaces, in favor of the Swift UI, I believe? Or is it Metal? That's the part I'm shady on.

I believe some plugins utilize the Cocoa API, and therefore will not display properly in Big Sur without an update.

Yeah, but the thing is mine do not. They use no GUI at all: they're absolutely stock CoreAudio interface-less Audio Units, which means the host DAW has to draw the interface for them.

That means there should be no obstacle to Big Sur supporting them, provided the DAW works under Big Sur, and that's why I'm asking about whether Apple is managing to literally break CoreAudio with Big Sur. There is no reason I should support that, and absolutely no chance I'm going to abandon support for all previous systems in order to make changes to support Big Sur. It should be EASY for them to cope with this, especially if they're emulating much more complicated and demanding Intel plugins.

One workaround might be wrapper plugins like the Blue Cat stuff. Another might be telling Apple to support its own CoreAudio interfaces?

@ chrisj yeah that’s not the issue for you, after talking to a developer friend of mine. My understanding of the Cocoa API is also off anyway.

I try

All APIs are either on their way out or else not ready yet.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Another developer here.

That's true. I think some problems in this thread might be because of Logic itself. I did a clean install on a small MBA 2013 to test Big Sur. As there are no drivers for my Motu system yet, I started installing plugins and other audio related software to test Big Sur.

I downloaded Logic Pro 10.6 and installed everything. Most things worked great, but AutoTune 8.1 for example crashes Logic Pro 10.6 every time. No problems with AutoTune 8.1 in Reaper or the free Ocenaudio on Big Sur. So I copied LPX 10.4.8 from my main computer to the new Big Sur installation and tried it again: AutoTune 8.1 opens in LPX 10.4.8 under Big Sur and works fine.

Had the same problem with URS Saturation64. Works fine with LPX10.4.8 and crashes Logic with 10.6.

Maybe check in settings, security that the plug-in's aren’t needing approval.
Reboot

I finally pulled the trigger on an Apple refurbished 2019 imac i9. I decided to just take the plunge and install the latest of everything. I'm on Big Sur, Pro Tools 2020.11.0, and downloaded the latest version of every plugin I had.

I use all kinds of plugins. I Native Instruments Battery 4, Omnisphere 2, Waves, Acustica, Massey, McDsp, Sound Toys, PSP, IK Media, and a bunch of others. I also have SonarWorks but it's not approved for Big Sur yet. It works as a plugin but if you try to turn your correction profile on and off from the systemwide menu you get a sample rate error.

I haven't noticed any more issues with this new setup than the one I had before on Mojave. There are some slight GUI glitches, and occasional crashes when trying to move certain plugins around. All in all it's no worse than what I had before. I actually really like the new Pro Tools and Big Sur.

Eventide isn't ready for Big Sur yet and I have some of their plugins. The only annoying thing is that I use a lot of Air Windows plugins, and Big Sur doesn't like them so the first time I load any one of the components into Blu Cat Patchwork, it gives me the security warning, then I have to go into preferences and allow it. Not terribly inconvenient since it only happens the first time you open it, but can be annoying when you're in the zone.

All in all I would call it a success.

Soooo… that would suggest that you have never used Terminal to tell Gatekeeper that all the plugins are OK, and therefore you have to go by the security warning? 'Cos if all this is down to that, I've been giving people instructions on how to direct Gatekeeper this whole time, for Catalina.

Did you ever run Catalina? Or are you coming from something like Mojave, or earlier? I've got a text clipping dedicated to explaining how to use Terminal to direct Gatekeeper. I wouldn't expect that to go away in Big Sur, in fact it should be the same process. You'll have to do that for literally anything anywhere that was made before Gatekeeper was a thing.

Thanks for the reply.

No I never ran Catalina. I would love to see the text clipping so I can get all your plugs working. I use them a lot. Thanks!

Absolutely, here you go (I was busy working on a reverb and missed your post, or I would've replied sooner)

Here’s my collection of Catalina gatekeeper instructions

I’ve got one report that says you can do a re-scan within Logic’s plugin manager, and then as you run ‘reset and re-scan selection’ you can go to system prefs/security and it’ll show that Gatekeeper stopped the plugin from opening but there was an option for ‘open anyway’. If you’re able to do it that way the plugin will pass validation in Logic.

If that doesn’t work, the Terminal command to run will be like this (if you have the NewUpdates folder open on your desktop):

sudo xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Desktop/NewUpdates/*

sudo (you’ll supply your password) lets you do administrator stuff
xattr -d removes the attribute ‘com.apple.quarantine’ from things,
the -r means recursive so it will go into subfolders and anything in NewUpdates, so don’t point this at your whole hard drive

Now, I can't guarantee that will help, but I hope it does: that would be great, it'd make this more of a solved problem. If the sliders are still un-alterable we have deeper problems. Also, note that you should not do this as a matter of course, set up some script or anything: the cumbersome nature of it is there to protect you, you have to be sure of what you're doing. Do NOT point the script at your whole Mac, or set up all your downloads to automatically do this. Gatekeeper has its place. It just shouldn't dictate what software you're allowed to retain out of your old software collection

For disabling Gatekeeper, I have been using the free Onyx app:

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

That's a drop in the bucket compared to all the money I have spent on Cubase upgrades over the years. IMO, Cubase .5 releases should be free given how little new functionality is typically added. Though I would gladly pay for any .5 release that actually addressed the UI inconsistencies and workflow issues in Cubase.

Apple has added a ton of functionality to Logic 10.x without charging customers.

Yeah I did that whole thing going from VST Audio to VST24 to VST32 before I jumped ship. Apple used to do the same dance but they were still a bit cheaper than when Emagic was in charge. Paid like $800 for Logic Audio Platinum 4. Then the $400 upgrade to 5, I think $299 to 6, 7, 8.. Somewhere in there Apple dropped the price down to $200 but it took awhile. Steinberg's racket is what's kept me staying with Logic all these years. I hated the UI of SX so didn't switch with it, but now Im reading about charging for updates on top of upgrades, its still ridiculously expensive to buy it, I have to spend an extra $30 on a dongle (still have the parallel port VST one), etc..

Update:

In order to migrate backward to Catalina from Big Sur (as, and for the reasons, previously described), I partitioned my 1 TB SSD into two volumes—900 GB and 100 GB and put Big Sur on the larger, Catalina on the smaller.

Ducky. Worked—until I bought some more plug-ins and ran out of room on the Catalina partition. Aarg.

So, then I had to do separate Time Machine backups of both OSs. Erase the 1 TB SSD, re-partition it (this time 750/250), and restore from Time Machine.

All went according to plan, except that Apple’s recovery mode forced me to first do a clean install of Big Sur from Apple in recovery mode and then, use Migration Assistant to do my Time Machine recovery. However, in the end, that all worked fine.

So, hoping against hope that maybe a clean install of Big Sur would result in my Element units working correctly, I gave them a try. Holy guacamoly!!

The Apogee software could not even detect the Element units (neither the 24 or the 88). (BTW, both work fine on the Catalina OS partition.)

Apple’s System readout showed both units were connected Thunderbolt devices.

Well, so methinks perhaps Apogee has put out a firmware update that they didn’t bother to tell us about. So, I run Apogee Firmware Updater. It can’t see the units either.

So I deinstall and then reinstall the Element software off of Apogee’s website.

Still no detection, (I guess this is the “intermittent detection” problem Apogee references in their “Compatible” assertion re Big Sur and Element).

All in all, I have wasted about two days reconfiguring my system to be able to record using Apogee’s wonderful Element device. Bummer.

Running Cubase 11 on Big Sur(11.1)… everything working flawlessly on an oldschool Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014, i7, 16gigs RAM, MacBook Pro.

Just got an M1 MacBook Air, running Big Sur 11.1. The Valhalla plugins open up and run in Logic just fine. Which is a cool thing to witness.

Apple absolutely deprecated some of their older APIs, so they may have broken CoreAudio in the way you are currently supporting it. My suggestion would be to try building your plugins on a Mojave or later machine, using XCode 10 or something more recent.

I know that Valhalla plugins built in late 2019 were working on early betas of Big Sur, but the plugins built in 2017 or earlier will NOT work in Big Sur. I rebuilt everything a few months back to use the latest & greatest SDKs -
XCode 10, Mojave SDK targeting 10.8 as the earliest supported OS, and Juce updates you don't have to worry about. Odds are good that you will have to break compatibility with 10.6 and 10.7 to run on Big Sur, but the notarized installers won't even open up in 10.6.8, so Apple is forcing our hand there.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Im not really comfortable with terminal like that so for now I'm going to just add each exception as I pull up your different plugs. Thanks again.

I just got a 2019 imac and installed all new everything. The biggest problem I think is sonarworks. Originally I was using the correction via systemwide. Problem is turning the correction on and off caused issues.

After that I decided to use the plug-in version. This helped with the on/off issue but I noticed a lot more clicks and pops in pro tools. I haven't quite pinned down if the clicks and pops are from sonarworks, pro tools not being approved for big sur, or something else. It is annoying though.

I think it mostly happens when playing midi notes. At first I thought it might be the crucial ram I installed because bi noticed the clicks and pops around the time I upgraded, but I put the apple ram back in and it still happened. I don't know.

I'm hoping that peo tools official release and sonarworks fixes the issue. It doesn't happen much, if at all, when mixing, just with midi programming.

Native Instruments released a public beta for Native Access that will enable install and activate their products to run under Rosetta.

From their forum:

Some of you have been asking about Apple Silicon compatibility and I'd like to share some notes regarding Native Access:

From Dec 16th, 2020, we’re enabling the installation of NI products on computers with Apple Silicon processors. With the exception of MASSIVE X, all of our products can be activated, installed and updated as normal using this beta version of Native Access, which will run on the latest generation of Mac computers via Apple’s automatic translation environment Rosetta 2.

Please note however that we are not yet able to offer technical support for products installed in this way.

We are working to ensure full support for Apple Silicon across all of our current products, but time frames for compatibility will vary, and we are not yet able to announce any specific dates.

We will keep you updated with any new developments on this topic, but in the meantime, please check updates on our Knowledge Base to obtain current information on compatibility with Apple Silicon: https://bit.ly/NISupport_Silicon

One possibility that amuses me is treating it like the Windows and Linux VST builds: I absolutely refuse to break backwards compatability, BUT if I ever get an Apple Silicon Mac (a very sketchy prospect as I broke my bank getting an Intel iMac Pro, not knowing this was in store) I could simply work out some form of special compile (possibly locking an early Apple Silicon Mac into a change-me-not configuration so they can't break it out from under me?) and come up with a workflow for doing a special Apple Silicon recompile, while STILL keeping the PPC/32/64 builds I currently make

I refuse to do this if I don't have the super-Mac to run the stuff on. Rather irritated that I dumped a bunch of money (well, for me it was a bunch) into the last great Intel Mac designs that are promptly obsoleted, so I am in no great haste to go buying even more Apple products right now. (though I do have a very nice monitor going unused, from a previous computer configuration: not nearly as good a screen as the iMac Pro, but super wide and curvy)

But if I DID have the newest breed of machines, it's not implausible that I could come up with some kind of routine for recompiling the projects I'm using for primary development. It's the usual thing with me: I can't do it until I have a system and then I can do all 200 plugins at a stroke, boom, and spend weeks updating literally everything. But not until I'm actually using the things. Don't care how pretty they are. I'll still be doing primary development on an antique, and everything's gotta be able to run on that

Universal Audio, bravo!) Good present for a Christmas!)
I go to run my new drivers for Big Sur.

Apple has in no way 'obsoleted' the Intel side of things or that iMac. They're still planning (or were at least) on new Intel Mac's coming out in the interim, and there is no way in hell they're going to abandon all the folks that kicked and screamed for the last 8 years for the $6000+ entry level Mac Pro that just came out last year. Intel still has quite a bit of life left in Apple's domain. There was even a new model of a 16" Intel MacBook that snuck into the Big Sur builds we still haven't seen released yet.

They put everything they had into the G4 Cube too, and sold it for nearly $1800. It had 20G. (not RAM, hard drive space it had 64M of RAM. This was 2000) It spawned the Mac Minis in a sense, and was a cutting-edge design much like how the iMac Pro (or indeed the new Mac Pro) pulls out all the stops to do recordbreaking things within… the Intel technology.

Oopsy. Within… two years you'll be able to get a Mac M1 Mini that kills the Intel Mac Pro monster-tower in at least a few real-world things and gets close to it in everything else. And it won't be Mac Pro Tower prices. And there'll be some new monolith made of solid M1 chips, that'll become Skynet

I've been using Apple stuff since the Performa 575. That was a 68k machine, with 5M RAM and a 160M hard drive. It had a CD-Rom drive! You could play Myst on its 640x480 screen

My iMac Pro is TOTALLY obsoleted by the new M1 Macs. My iMac Pro will ALSO remain quite useable for lots of relevant things for a long long LONG time… but it's because of people like me who continue to program for stuff like that. I give Apple… four years before the only XCode you can run on the very newest machines which will not run old XCodes, will not compile to Intel anymore. Four years is a long time, but what I'm saying is that this 'obsoleting' is not my machine suddenly ceasing to work, or becoming unable to do what it already does. What I'm saying is that Apple will inevitably throw it under the bus to force me to buy into the new generation.

Mind you, this is how they DO the new generations. I get that.

It's fairly likely I'll even get into the new generation myself, well within that four years' time.

I'm just saying that you have to be made of money, because they absolutely will abandon all the folks. It's really kind of weird. Macs hold their value incredibly well, and stand up amazingly to years of use, and there are some of us who make an art form out of legacy support, and there are loads of (especially!) studio people who've spent a lot of money on optical-digital ADC/DACs or Firewire multichannel converters, Thunderbolt, etc. That combined with CoreAudio means we can treat the old gear like treasured tape machines: stuff can just work and do serious duty and never be 'obsolete'. All the while, Apple strips away support for those very machines release after release: XCode evolves and casts off the old hardware Apple no longer enjoys.

Means there's two worlds. The old studio rats, with a Studer tape machine and an old G5 with $20,000 of antique digital interfaces that can capture 36 simultaneous tracks all sounding great, are all set never upgrading a thing. And the folks running the Apple Silicon machines get to run 4096 tracks each with 256 Space Designers on 'em, at 192k. And never the twain shall meet…

Probably. It’s the only thing that could explain the manic rush towards ever smaller and more powerful computers. Transhumanism.

There’s practically no progress outside computing, it currently is man’s only obsession, or so it seems.