Since I was already all 64-bit, nothing broke DAW-wise. Bitwig, Ableton and (of course) Logic Pro X are all fine. Overall it looks like CoreAudio, AUs, etc., have not changed at all.
No plugins broke that I have found so far, although I did not load them all. I did check a variety of them from different developers, including U-He, Arturia, NI, iZotope, Eventide, Valhalla, Klanghelm, PluginAlliance, Soundtoys, Fabfilter, Xfer Records, and Xils.
I had to update to the latest SafeNet HASP HL driver for my Hauptwerk dongle to work, as the old version was 32-bit. I also had to update eLicenser's Control Panel for my eLicenser dongle to work.
Hauptwerk was a bit problematic because by default, Hauptwerk installs organs and settings into a folder at the root of the hard drive. In Catalina this is not possible. Nothing can touch the root of the system volume. Anything that was there before the upgrade gets moved to /Users/Shared/Relocated Files/System. It was easy enough to move my /Hauptwerk directory to /Users/Shared and update the Hauptwerk config file to update the paths.
So: If you have created folders in the root of your system volume, and rely upon those folders for audio production, this will cause you problems. You will need to move them to standardized locations, and adjust.
Sonarworks Reference 4 will not install. The update fails when trying to install the Reference Systemwide driver. However, the already-installed VST and AU continue to work for me. If you need to install from scratch, you will have to wait for an update from Sonarworks.
I use RogueAmoeba's products, but they are not critical to my music production. Audio Hijack is not officially supported, and the old version breaks in Catalina. However, if you install the just-released update for AirFoil, it will install a new version of the ACE audio redirector driver that is working on Catalina, and this allows Audio Hijack to work again. I expect they will have updated versions of Audio Hijack, SoundSource, and LoopBack that are fully supported fairly soon.
I use XLD for encoding audio, and its AAC encoding was broken, but there was a fix that solved the problem on the SourceForge support forums for XLD.
As for non-audio stuff, I had to update the following to get them to work: Default Folder X (beta version), Nisus Writer Pro, Logos Bible Software (beta), and Backblaze (beta).
Current versions of the following, which I use on a regular basis, worked fine: Adobe CC Suite 2019, MS Office 365 desktop apps, Firefox and Chrome-based browsers, World of Warcraft Classic, Bartender 3, Better Touch Tool, Karabiner, iStat Menu, Parallels 15, Dropbox, PyCharm and other IntelliJ-based IDEs, Mellel, Duet Display, and Mellel.
New and very significant findings: The new Gatekeeper security model has now been extended to AUs and (theoretically) VSTs. I believe this is mostly an issue for AUs. If your AU is not signed, gatekeeper blocks it entirely. It won't load, and there is no way in Finder or the DAW to fix this. The workaround for Apps (right-click, open) does not work with plugins for obvious reasons. For example, none of the Airwindows AUs would load after I updated them. There is a relatively easy solution. In Terminal, run this command on the AU component package:
Code: Select all
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <path-to-AU-component>
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xattr -d com.apple.quarantine airwindows/*
The workaround for this issue is a lot more painful, and I won't post what I did here in detail, except to say that the only way past this is to patch the binary in the AU component, removing all code signature information, and then removing the code signature information from the AU package. At this point, you can run the xattr command above, and the plugin will now load as an unsigned plugin.