Any brave souls tried Catalina on your DAW machine?

[teilo]

macOS 10.15, Catalina, is around the corner, and it removes 32-bit support. Anyone with a 32-bit workflow will need to stay on Mojave.

I am one of the fortunate souls that started this hobby well after the 64-bit transition was underway, so everything I have theoretically is 64-bit. My first DAW was Ableton 9 64-bit from the start. All my plugins are 64-bit.

BUT, that doesn't mean everything is going to work. A lot of 64-bit software has a bad habit of using 32-bit utilities for some operations. eLicenser, for example, only just updated to a 64-bit version of their control center.

Have any brave souls tried the Catalina beta with their DAW setup yet? I'm curious what common production software has been confirmed functional / non-functional.

[Forgotten]

No, I’ll just do what I always do and upgrade a week or so after it’s released.

[sprnva]

Not going anywhere near it, but I had a look through the installed apps on my Sierra system to see what relevant ones were still 32-bit:

Focusrite License Helper (from Scarlett Plug-in Suite)
IK Multimedia Authorization Manager, Custom Shop and T-RackS 4 CS standalone.
Korg Legacy Collection standalone apps.

Scarlett MixControl would have been there but they have a beta 64-bit release available.

[teilo]

No, I’ll just do what I always do and upgrade a week or so after it’s released.

Good for you. Next.

[Forgotten]

No, I’ll just do what I always do and upgrade a week or so after it’s released.

Good for you. Next.

[stearine]

Just as a sidenote... Apple's customers are unbelievable. No other company would make their clientele bend over and worship their feet after announcing that the most significant feature of their next OS update will be causing massive grief to a lot of users. No other company (that I know of anyway) could do it and have their customers semi-autonomously begin re-educating and re-conditioning their peers to accept the imminent disaster as God's will and begin the preparations by indulging in self-flagellation. To an outsider "the Apple world" looks like a never-ending carnival, always on the move, trying to keep the buzz going, collectively campaigning to turn any negative news into positive, restrictions into freedoms, straitjackets into roller skates in a disco, and unconditionally accepting and then dutifully regurgitating everything that the grand ayatollahs orate. It looks like a religion with its powerful self-regulatory behaviors, thought-policing and gospeling. I only did a few minutes worth of googling and already found several different sites which all parrot the official Apple truth about why such a drastic change is perfectly reasonable and justified, most of which makes very little sense to me but hey, I'm not a Reborn Applean. I'm sure they have their reasons, but "performance" and "progress" are not it - they're a business, not the Hare Krishna.

[Rockatansky]

Just as a sidenote... Apple's customers are unbelievable. No other company would make their clientele bend over and worship their feet after announcing that the most significant feature of their next OS update will be causing massive grief to a lot of users. No other company (that I know of anyway) could do it and have their customers semi-autonomously begin re-educating and re-conditioning their peers to accept the imminent disaster as God's will and begin the preparations by indulging in self-flagellation. To an outsider "the Apple world" looks like a never-ending carnival, always on the move, trying to keep the buzz going, collectively campaigning to turn any negative news into positive, restrictions into freedoms, straitjackets into roller skates in a disco, and unconditionally accepting and then dutifully regurgitating everything that the grand ayatollahs orate. It looks like a religion with its powerful self-regulatory behaviors, thought-policing and gospeling. I only did a few minutes worth of googling and already found several different sites which all parrot the official Apple truth about why such a drastic change is perfectly reasonable and justified, most of which makes very little sense to me but hey, I'm not a Reborn Applean. I'm sure they have their reasons, but "performance" and "progress" are not it - they're a business, not the Hare Krishna.

You finally got that off your chest, phew. Too bad no Mac user cares.
Here's something that should keep you busy while you wait for triggered fanbois' responses.

@topic
Although my DAWs and plugins are all 64-bit compatible, there are still several other things that aren't. Developers' custom installers (IK Auth Manager, IK Custom Shop, iZotope, Kilohearts, Steam, games, and probably many other things that I just don't have installed, or that aren't categorized as applications, like background services or kernel extensions, preference panes, ... way too risky to update now.

[stearine]

You finally got that off your chest, phew. Too bad no Mac user cares.
Here's something that should keep you busy while you wait for triggered fanbois' responses.

Interesting observations and much appreciated. I'm always looking to learn more.

[Forgotten]

Here we go again...

[stearine]

It's not a massive undertaking to make 64-bit executables of those 32-bit installers. It could potentially be much more tedious to do the reverse because you might have specified 64-bit data types and interfaces depending on them in the code, which you'd have to adapt for 32-bit instruction set, registers and memory space, whereas the 64-bit architecture can accommodate the 32-bit code. I'd guess any competent software house will provide those 64-bit installers overnight without breaking a sweat, it's just a mild annoyance to them because until they decide to stop maintaining 32-bit binaries, they're going to have to provide two separate installers.

It's also why I'm curious as to why Apple decided to cut out 32-bit applications altogether. The claims about performance gains sound dubious to me, I'd have to see some benchmarks to take it seriously. The marketed truth is that Apple is going to take you to the more performant Future. Simplifying the OS internals and cutting on legacy support and backward compatibility might be valid enough reasons, but does not sound as marketable.

[chk071]

No, I’ll just do what I always do and upgrade a week or so after it’s released.

You're like me.

[teilo]

Just as a sidenote... Apple's customers are unbelievable. No other company would make their clientele bend over and worship their feet after announcing that the most significant feature of their next OS update will be causing massive grief to a lot of users. …

Just as a sidenote… Perhaps make your observations without stereotyping and insulting Apple users.

I happen to think this particular move is boneheaded, and I've been an Apple user since OS X Panther and lived through the Intel / PowerPC / Rosetta transition. That one was handled fairly well. This one just seems pointless. I mean, I get the advantages. It does simplify things for developers to a limited degree (well, for new products anyway). I'm a Linux admin, and I hated the split support setup there (with doubled up directories for the 64-bit versions of everything in order to support dual architectures. Distros which are 64-bit only are so much cleaner.

But from the perspective of customers none of this matters. Their stuff breaks, and developers are forced to scramble to keep their customers happy, or else look bad through no fault of their own.

But boneheaded or not, I think I know why they are doing it. I suspect that part of this is driven by Apple's desire to release their own ARM-based high-end CPU. If / when that happens (and there are significant reasons to believe it might — look at what Apple is doing with intermediate bytecode and the Apple Watch for some clues), we would be back in Rosettaland again (sort of), and it would be substantially easier to create a translation layer for a single architecture than having to support i386 and x64 in some sort of emulation / recompiliation layer.

It would be quite like Rosetta was, though. It would be more like what happens in the AppStore, a combination of what they now do with iOS and watchOS. From iOS: Binaries are fat, but are auto-thinned to remove any pre-compiled machine code for other architectures at installation. From watchOS: Applications are no longer compiled directly to machine code, but to an intermediate bytecode that can, when needed, be recompiled at install time to support other architectures. This is what they want. I have my doubts that they will ever get there. There is too much professional tooling out there that would have to be completely re-written to support such a system. I just don't see it happening unless they also support an emulation environment of some sort. But it would explain a lot about the architecture and developer framework changes that have lately been occurring.

[Gamma-UT]

Just as a sidenote... Apple's customers are unbelievable. No other company would make their clientele bend over and worship their feet after announcing that the most significant feature of their next OS update will be causing massive grief to a lot of users. No other company (that I know of anyway) could do it and have their customers semi-autonomously begin re-educating and re-conditioning their peers to accept the imminent disaster as God's will and begin the preparations by indulging in self-flagellation. To an outsider "the Apple world" looks like a never-ending carnival, always on the move, trying to keep the buzz going, collectively campaigning to turn any negative news into positive, restrictions into freedoms, straitjackets into roller skates in a disco, and unconditionally accepting and then dutifully regurgitating everything that the grand ayatollahs orate. It looks like a religion with its powerful self-regulatory behaviors, thought-policing and gospeling. I only did a few minutes worth of googling and already found several different sites which all parrot the official Apple truth about why such a drastic change is perfectly reasonable and justified, most of which makes very little sense to me but hey, I'm not a Reborn Applean. I'm sure they have their reasons, but "performance" and "progress" are not it - they're a business, not the Hare Krishna.

Oh I see another Mac-curious bystander has arrived.

The desire. It hurtssss ussss. It hurtsssss usssss precioussssss.

[sprnva]

You can also disable 32-bit mode in High Sierra and Mojave if you want a taste of the 64-bit-only bliss that awaits with Catalina.

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to ... -bit-mode/

This way you can check and see if anything breaks.

[Forgotten]

I think I already know what issues I have (essentially next to none), but that's a useful way to test things that I wasn't aware of