Mac OS Monterey - Plugin Compatibility

[JNS WRNHD]

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar ... ity-guide/

[dayjob]

so. monterey 12.2 was recently released. anyone install it yet?

macOS 12.2 includes bug fixes and security updates for your Mac and is recommended for all users.

For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222

[wangeroge]

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar ... ity-guide/

So basically Waves and Cherry Audio are good software companies and the others are musicians who take their time.

[sqigls]

i've been on 12.2 for a week or so. Smooth sailing so far.

[Rickskii]

Me too. Updated straight away and not noticed anything different.

[sQeetz]

12.2 updated the day it was released. No problems whatsoever

[pdxindy]

+1

[left_seat]

Hey,
I know this thread is mostly about Monterey but I didn’t see one specifically about Big Sur-apologies if there is one. I’m still chugging away on Catalina because everything is working pretty well and I’m just really leery of making changes. When I got my new Mac and it came with Catalina, so many of the plug-in developers hadn't yet caught up and I had to wait and wait to use many of my go-to plugins. I’ve found a few compatibility lists online recently but I suspect they haven't been diligently updated. Is moving to Big Sur pretty much a no-brainer at this point? Thanks so much in advance.

[martinjuenke]

Hey,
I know this thread is mostly about Monterey but I didn’t see one specifically about Big Sur-apologies if there is one. I’m still chugging away on Catalina because everything is working pretty well and I’m just really leery of making changes. When I got my new Mac and it came with Catalina, so many of the plug-in developers hadn't yet caught up and I had to wait and wait to use many of my go-to plugins. I’ve found a few compatibility lists online recently but I suspect they haven't been diligently updated. Is moving to Big Sur pretty much a no-brainer at this point? Thanks so much in advance.

I switched from Catalina to Big Sur around three months ago and found no issues with my set up (I have far too many plugins...).

[left_seat]

Hey,
I know this thread is mostly about Monterey but I didn’t see one specifically about Big Sur-apologies if there is one. I’m still chugging away on Catalina because everything is working pretty well and I’m just really leery of making changes. When I got my new Mac and it came with Catalina, so many of the plug-in developers hadn't yet caught up and I had to wait and wait to use many of my go-to plugins. I’ve found a few compatibility lists online recently but I suspect they haven't been diligently updated. Is moving to Big Sur pretty much a no-brainer at this point? Thanks so much in advance.

I switched from Catalina to Big Sur around three months ago and found no issues with my set up (I have far too many plugins...).

Thanks!

[UrbanEric]

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar ... ity-guide/

So basically Waves and Cherry Audio are good software companies and the others are musicians who take their time.

Cherry Audio is a very new developer, so they probably started "day 1" with newer Mac OS development kits, tools, Metal, OpenGL, etc. This makes it easy for them. Plus I suspect they have common frameworks, code, GUI, across ALL of their products.

This is totally different than 15 year old plugins, plugins ported from Windows versions or frameworks, stuff designed with PC compatibility in mind, etc. In my experience (working with developers, beta testing plugins) the older the plugin, the harder. Even more challenging is if a company (iZotope) is using common tools, and then acquires a brand/product like Exponential) that may have always used a totally different development approach (tools, legacy code). Essentially everything becomes a "do-over". My fear is that the new, bean counter approach of NI+iZotope will look at EA and do a ROI analysis and make the obvious conclusion - it is not cost effective to continue or redevelop the EA reverbs. It certainly explains why they are selling off of the plugins for $10 via rotating sales on pluginboutique. They seem to be squeezing a dry sponge.

As for Waves, they are just huge. They have no choice but to keep up. They might have the largest team of developers and development kits in the industry. I have had a love/hate relationship over the years for some of their business practices (WUP, upgrades, sales vs. list pricing, wacky bundles, resale of licenses, etc.). But from a technical perspective it is amazing that they are literally still supporting 20 year old plugins. You can recall a Protools 5 session from 2002 with Waves L2 and it mostly works/recalls, 20 years and a zillion generations of hardware, O.S., and software codebases later. You can usually open or force that same session cross platform and cross O.S. (mac/windows) 20 years later. The sheer engineering effort to maintain this compatibility is staggering. Very few companies could or would choose this.

[wangeroge]

This is totally different than 15 year old plugins, plugins ported from Windows versions or frameworks, stuff designed with PC compatibility in mind, etc. In my experience (working with developers, beta testing plugins) the older the plugin, the harder. Even more challenging is if a company (iZotope) is using common tools, and then acquires a brand/product like Exponential) that may have always used a totally different development approach (tools, legacy code). Essentially everything becomes a "do-over". My fear is that the new, bean counter approach of NI+iZotope will look at EA and do a ROI analysis and make the obvious conclusion - it is not cost effective to continue or redevelop the EA reverbs. It certainly explains why they are selling off of the plugins for $10 via rotating sales on pluginboutique. They seem to be squeezing a dry sponge.

The developers which use the same libraries for general stuff like preset browsing, GUI stuff in every plugin only need to change one plugin to get all plugins ready for the next OS upgrade.

My hope is that iZotope will move the Exponential reverbs to their GUI libraries and release new versions. But maybe you are right. They did the same with the DDLY delay.

By the way, I upgraded to Monterey (Intel) without any problems apart from Exponential Audio. So this year the delay doesn't come from the developers, but from the QA testers.

[adamjay]

At this point I just want Exponential Excalibur to work in Monterey under Rosetta. M1 native or not, I just want to use the plug-in I spent money on, on both of my computers. (I bought two licenses, one for 2015 iMac, another for laptop which just got traded in for 2020 M1 Air)

[Lowbflat]

At this point I just want Exponential Excalibur to work in Monterey under Rosetta. M1 native or not, I just want to use the plug-in I spent money on, on both of my computers. (I bought two licenses, one for 2015 iMac, another for laptop which just got traded in for 2020 M1 Air)

We’d all like to see that but iZotope has had plenty of time to move forward in that direction — and they have not.

If any EA reverb other than PhoenixVerb works over Monterey… well I can’t make it happen. Rather than have projects not open at all, I removed al EA ‘verbs from my Macs. This way old projects will still open but give me ‘Plug-in missing’ messages. I can live with that—what choice do I have? Plenty of other reverb libraries work fine.

It’s time for me to move on.

[adamjay]

I hear you. Being impatient, I went ahead and updated my 2015 iMac to Monterey, Excalibur be damned. In the meantime I've been able to aproximate it's capabilities with some other plugins. That said, I complained about lack of Monterey support for Excalibur publicly, and got a reply from iZotope on twitter:

"Sorry to hear about the trouble with Excalibur. Our teams are looking into issues with Monterey OS for those EA products. We appreciate your patience while the teams work on updates for M1 and Monterey across our product lines"

Take that for what it's worth. I have a little hope. I'd like to come back to Excalibur eventually.