Any Mac users having any issues with Sequoia 15.0 and audio recording setups ?

pfschim

pfschim

Just a Skeleton with a Jazz bass
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Apr 26, 2006
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#1
Before I push the OK button, I thought I'd ask here if any of you Mac users experienced issues with your recording setup with the latest MacOS .. Sequoia 15.0 release/update.

I'm not worried about updates in general, and my interface maker (Focusrite) says that all 3rd Gen interfaces are good to go with Sequoia, but still .... I don't think I'm missing anything meaningful with 15.0 as far as my uses go.

So, anyone run into any issues ?
 
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#3
No issues at all on my system which is fully up to date with the OS. My system is built around a MOTU 16A. Not sure how Focusrite has kept up, but they tend to do a good job. I would check their website for disclaimers about updating, and if that’s all clear you should be good to go.
 
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#4
silky smoove said:
No issues at all on my system which is fully up to date with the OS. My system is built around a MOTU 16A. Not sure how Focusrite has kept up, but they tend to do a good job. I would check their website for disclaimers about updating, and if that’s all clear you should be good to go.
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Focusrite lists all 3rd gen interfaces as good to go with Sequoia. I'll go ahead and update tonight. 🤞
 
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#6
it's been only a couple of weeks since I updated to Sonoma and I don't think, I'll upgrade to Sequoia before the 16.0 is announced.

I like my studio Mac stable, so no need to chase the latest OS versions, Apple supports three latest major versions of macOS, so any of them but latest is safe for me. and fixing something important in .2-.3 releases is a usual thing.
 
#7
I've got some tracks to do for a client this week, so I'll see if Sequoia 15.0 changes anything in my workflow.

Bass=> Focusrite 18i8 Gen3 => M1 Macbook Air/Logic
 
#9
Aloe said:
it's been only a couple of weeks since I updated to Sonoma and I don't think, I'll upgrade to Sequoia before the 16.0 is announced.
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I usually only update every two years and always just before the newest OS drops. I updated from Monterey to Sonoma just last week. It’s very seldom that I actually need the latest bells and whistles and I prefer to let someone else find the bugs. The main reason I use Logic and only a few third party plugins is that I can expect it to still work with each new OS.

What always forces me to update is TurboTax, believe it or not :meh: Intuit sent out an email last month stating that Ventura would be required to file 2024 taxes so I jumped two OSes to Sonoma but wasn’t ready to risk Sequoia. Every year they require a newer OS than the previous year, typically it’s the OS dropped two years earlier…Ventura dropped in 2022. I should be good for 2024 and 2025 but will need Sequoia to file for 2026.

As far as known issues with Sequoia:

Over at Logic Pro Help, there’s posts about Sequoia bugs affecting Logic users. Native Instruments as always isn’t supporting Sequoia officially yet so a number of Kontakt users have seen crashes.

Sweetwater has a Sequoia compatibility page here with links to each vendor’s compatibility pages. For most hardware and software vendors it's either don’t update yet or no news at all.

Compatible DAWs: Logic, Garageband, Ableton Live 11 and 12, Bitwig, Digital Performer 11, Reason.

Not yet compatible DAWs: Cubase, Studio One, ProTools, Akai MPC, FL Studio.

Not yet compatible plugins: almost everything :dead:
 
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#10
brianrost said:
Native Instruments as always isn’t supporting Sequoia officially yet
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heh. maybe it's time to upgrade from trusty Kontakt 6 this year. is 7 stable yet (at least on Sonoma)?

also I have some other plugin that's officially supported only on Catalina, but somehow still works for me (or worked before Sonoma, didn't test it throughfully yet), so yeah, it's time to pay some money for plugin upgrades. I hate this part, but it's life.
 
#11
Aloe said:
also I have some other plugin that's officially supported only on Catalina, but somehow still works for me (or worked before Sonoma, didn't test it throughfully yet), so yeah, it's time to pay some money for plugin upgrades. I hate this part, but it's life.
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"Supported" is a weirdly complicated thing. Properly speaking what it means is that the code has been tested in specific environments and validated to work. Under the hood, what it means (broadly speaking) is mostly that the APIs (points where the code communicates with or operates on somebody else's code) are guaranteed to be available and work as they have been. When the OS updates, or the DAW updates, the plugin's author can no longer guarantee that those particular APIs will be the same, because the plugin's author doesn't have any control over them.

Normally, for mature software -- this includes all OSes you might use and most major DAWs -- the APIs tend not to churn that rapidly.* So it's not too surprising if an old plugin still works in a newer environment. Then again it's not surprising if the plugin breaks. Some software companies deliberately disable their products if they're run in an unsupported environment regardless of whether those products would actually be affected or not -- sometimes (well, a lot of the time) it's a cash grab, but it's also because the companies can't afford the added expense of trying to help customers running unsupported setups. It's a no-win situation, in some senses.

Maybe you work in software and know all this already. Hopefully this ramble is at least useful to somebody. I have friends who spent their whole careers working in operating systems and major software systems and in their personal time they still get frustrated by the relentless march of software upgrades too.

*(Operating systems and large extensible software platforms have hundreds or thousands of APIs, so it tends to *look* like there's a lot of churn every year, but any specific point has usually not changed much or at all or not in a way that affects existing client software. Responsible companies schedule the retirement of APIs far in advance (years, in the case of operating systems) and announce them to the world so that developers have time to work with the changes.)
 
#12
ardgedee said:
Normally, for mature software -- this includes all OSes you might use and most major DAWs -- the APIs tend not to churn that rapidly.*
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well, macs are traditionally worse in back compatibility than the competitor.

is Photoshop mature enough? at one point I owned a Photoshop that was a decade old. it ran fine on latest windows, but totally didn't run on anyhow modern macos.

actually back to the plugin I was referring. the full story is that's an old deprecated version, not updated anymore. and while the vendor said my best bet is indeed to buy an upgrade, they confirmed, the old version will run on the new OS except of one known bug.

the part of the problem is if software runs. the second is if it's supported, i.e. if you're in a commercial environment, you need support from the vendor if something goes wrong. if using abandonware is a goal, well, Windows is a better platform for this IME.
 
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#13
Aloe said:
well, macs are traditionally worse in back compatibility than the competitor.

is Photoshop mature enough? at one point I owned a Photoshop that was a decade old. it ran fine on latest windows, but totally didn't run on anyhow modern macos.

actually back to the plugin I was referring. the full story is that's an old deprecated version, not updated anymore. and while the vendor said my best bet is indeed to buy an upgrade, they confirmed, the old version will run on the new OS except of one known bug.

the part of the problem is if software runs. the second is if it's supported, i.e. if you're in a commercial environment, you need support from the vendor if something goes wrong. if using abandonware is a goal, well, Windows is a better platform for this IME.
Click to expand...
You can think of this in another way: Intel and Microsoft have encumbered their CPU and OS with support for every decision they've made for the past 40-plus years, with all the accumulated errors, inefficiencies and bulk that implies, and Apple hasn't -- they've freed themselves to discover brand new errors and inefficiencies to bundle into a much sleeker and more compact package!

You could possibly run that old Photoshop on a recent Mac... the operating system probably provides what it needs in terms of core utilities and graphics, but Photoshop also needs Java -- MacOS does not bundle it any more, so you have to install it separately, and you have to know which version of JRE you need... depending on which version of Photoshop you're talking about it might also need a very specific version of Python... I didn't say it wouldn't be tricky...

I've got some 14 year old software that runs fine on an M2 Mac. It all depends on what what the system can provide, what the software needs, and how good the developers were at future-proofing the software.

Certainly when you're dependent on something for your job it behooves you to keep it current when you can; "when you can" being a heck of a caveat. There are a lot of research labs and machine shops where they're still running Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 because of the software integrated with their equipment, and there's a segment of the vintage computer trader's market occupied by scientists whose labs can't raise the funds necessary to replace their 30 year old lab equipment so they're hoarding the old computers, monitors and peripherals needed to keep running.
 
#14
ardgedee said:
and Apple hasn't -- they've freed themselves to discover brand new errors and inefficiencies to bundle into a much sleeker and more compact package!
Click to expand...

yup, that pretty sums up my experience.

but I still cannot wrap my head around they managed to break the whole UX of a simple login screen in Sonoma.

ardgedee said:
You could possibly run that old Photoshop on a recent Mac... the operating system probably provides what it needs in terms of core utilities and graphics
Click to expand...

not really, I believe, it was a pre-Cocoa Photoshop and the Carbon API (literally the old API for the UI) is just dead for some years. migrating from this old API in stable, mature multi-year projects was a pain, including Apple's own ones.
 
#15
Aloe said:
not really, I believe, it was a pre-Cocoa Photoshop and the Carbon API (literally the old API for the UI) is just dead for some years. migrating from this old API in stable, mature multi-year projects was a pain, including Apple's own ones.
Click to expand...
Carbon was more or less an interim API to reduce the urgency of transitioning from "Classic" Mac System to "Modern" MacOSX. In a sense it was meant to be a suite common to Classic and Modern so that software companies could minimize the effort of moving to the Modern OS, or allow them to support both Classic and Modern OSes with their applications until enough of their own user base had upgraded.

Cocoa, by contrast, in a sense dates to the late-1980s since it inherits from dev environments for NeXT OS and was adapted as needed for MacOSX (for example, NeXT OS uses Display Postscript and Macs don't). Cocoa existed before Carbon and is still around; Carbon arrived late and left early.

The average Mac user at that time tended to hold on to their computer for more than twice as long as the average Windows user. That meant a lot of waiting for people to get rid of their old Macs. Carbon was supported for 19 years!
 
#16
Aloe said:
well, macs are traditionally worse in back compatibility than the competitor.

is Photoshop mature enough? at one point I owned a Photoshop that was a decade old. it ran fine on latest windows, but totally didn't run on anyhow modern macos.

actually back to the plugin I was referring. the full story is that's an old deprecated version, not updated anymore. and while the vendor said my best bet is indeed to buy an upgrade, they confirmed, the old version will run on the new OS except of one known bug.

the part of the problem is if software runs. the second is if it's supported, i.e. if you're in a commercial environment, you need support from the vendor if something goes wrong. if using abandonware is a goal, well, Windows is a better platform for this IME.
Click to expand...
If you knew how much legacy code is in Window OS's you'd understand why they can do this. Sadly, performance will suffer if the PS code can't use the current processing speed, etc.

For $10.99/month you can subscribe to Photoshop and Lightroom and receive all updates as they are released - not worth buying these softwars anymore.
 
#17
updated to Sequoia 15.0 with no issues on my install of Logic after about 25 tracking projects done. I also did the point update to 15.1 without any apparent issues.
 
#20
ardgedee said:
Time Machine does not make a copy of the OS.
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by default it does for sure. I have restored multiple times like this, for more than a decade
IIRC when you restore it even shows you the versions of the macOS in your different backup versions

in fact, it's the only supported way to roll back a macOS upgrade, so doing the backup before a major upgrade is a basic thing, most mac users do or will start to do after the first time, they'll need to downgrade.

www.macworld.com

How to downgrade macOS update: Rollback Sequoia to Sonoma

Regret updating to macOS Sequoia? Here's how to uninstall Sequoia and revert back to Sonoma.
www.macworld.com www.macworld.com
 
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