Will Ableton live 11.1 support non-native plugins? [Macbook M1 Pro)

[thetimtim]

11.1 with m1 native support is coming soon. However, in the current beta. There is no support for 3rd party plugins through Rosetta. Which results in some of my most important plugins not being compatible (SoundToys, Plugin Alliance & Sonarworks) Anyone knows what the plan here is? I should probably stay on 11.0 till all my plugins are native. Or will the 11.1 official release support plugins through Rosetta 2?

Cheers

[Machinesworking]

11.1 with m1 native support is coming soon. However, in the current beta. There is no support for 3rd party plugins through Rosetta. Which results in some of my most important plugins not being compatible (SoundToys, Plugin Alliance & Sonarworks) Anyone knows what the plan here is? I should probably stay on 11.0 till all my plugins are native. Or will the 11.1 official release support plugins through Rosetta 2?

Cheers

You have a fundamental lack of knowledge on this and luckily for you, you're wrong here.

Audio Units are supported with Rosetta at more or less an OS level, but not VSTs v2 or 3. The only exception to this is Bitwig, because it wraps the plug in as a separate process from the DAW and allows the OS to run them as Rosetta. I'm sitting here with the latest Live beta and Amplitube 5 running in Rosetta as an AU on an M1 MacBook Air.

If you've been attempting this with VSTs you will get nowhere, it's also possible that Rosetta isn't installed on your system, or that you don't have Audio Units checked as an option in Live.

[pottering]

Apple is going to fully remove Rosetta sooner or later (making any bridge worthless), the longer you keep using Rosetta stuff the worse it is going to be for you later (if you plan to stay in Apple's ecosystem, well, switching to PC would not be painless either).

[thetimtim]

11.1 with m1 native support is coming soon. However, in the current beta. There is no support for 3rd party plugins through Rosetta. Which results in some of my most important plugins not being compatible (SoundToys, Plugin Alliance & Sonarworks) Anyone knows what the plan here is? I should probably stay on 11.0 till all my plugins are native. Or will the 11.1 official release support plugins through Rosetta 2?

Cheers

You have a fundamental lack of knowledge on this and luckily for you, you're wrong here.

Audio Units are supported with Rosetta at more or less an OS level, but not VSTs v2 or 3. The only exception to this is Bitwig, because it wraps the plug in as a separate process from the DAW and allows the OS to run them as Rosetta. I'm sitting here with the latest Live beta and Amplitube 5 running in Rosetta as an AU on an M1 MacBook Air.

If you've been attempting this with VSTs you will get nowhere, it's also possible that Rosetta isn't installed on your system, or that you don't have Audio Units checked as an option in Live.

ooooooooooooooh I love you! Bless your abundance of fundamental knowledge on this. I deliberately unchecked AU downloads on all my plugins because I didn't need them. And have indeed unchecked them as a plugin source in Ableton Live. Guess I will re-install AU versions of these plugins and test it out. This will bridge the gap until all vst's are m1 native for sure.

[thetimtim]

Apple is going to fully remove Rosetta sooner or later (making any bridge worthless), the longer you keep using Rosetta stuff the worse it is going to be for you later (if you plan to stay in Apple's ecosystem, well, switching to PC would not be painless either).

Thanks for the advice! I checked and these three plugin manufacturers that I mentioned are the only essential plugins that I still need. As they all seem to have plans to switch to m1 native, I'm sure this is just for the time being.

Cheers!

[Machinesworking]

There's some probably European law about selling hardware without support for five years, so Rosetta will not go away until Apple sell their last (likely) Mac Pros with Intel chips so basically 5-6 years from now Mac OS will drop Rosetta, plenty of time.

I'm curious as to how AU's react to switching? As of now I have Amplitube 5 and the VEP plug in running in Rosetta. The test is will songs with these plug ins transparently switch? or will I have to load the plug in again with it's presets?

So it's probably a good idea not to rely on Ableton Live to remember AU parameter settings in plug ins and actually commit to saving presets of tweaked plug ins.

[pottering]

Those 3 companies mentioned (SoundToys, Plugin Alliance & Sonarworks) seem to have AU versions of their plugins, AU Rosetta plugins load in Live M1 native.

Apple provided their own solution for AU plugins (Steinberg still didn't for VST).

It is their own solution so I guess they will keep it running until they drop Rosetta as a whole (unlike the "Not Invented Here" non-Apple stuff).

[Machinesworking]

Those 3 companies mentioned (SoundToys, Plugin Alliance & Sonarworks) seem to have AU versions of their plugins, AU Rosetta plugins load in Live M1 native.

Apple provided their own solution for AU plugins (Steinberg still didn't for VST).

It is their own solution so I guess they will keep it running until they drop Rosetta as a whole (unlike the "Not Invented Here" non-Apple stuff).

This is probably the only time when being a pedant is the correct thing, shouldn't use the term "native" here in this case. Native is being used as a way to describe M1 Apple silicon coded plug ins. At a Mac OS level it's easy to set up your DAW to run Rosetta AU plug ins when the DAW is running natively as an Apple Silicon App. Ableton Live, DP, Logic, Reaper, and others can do this.

[pottering]

Yeah, my bad, I'm not a Mac user, don't fully grasp the terms.

[Machinesworking]

^^^ We can run you in a simulation mode, just hang out in a Starbucks with a thin aluminum laptop and nerd glasses.

[grrrz]

Apple is going to fully remove Rosetta sooner or later (making any bridge worthless), the longer you keep using Rosetta stuff the worse it is going to be for you later (if you plan to stay in Apple's ecosystem, well, switching to PC would not be painless either).

We're far from there yet; rosetta will probably be supported for many years. 5 years should be the minimum. For now it's still the early days; and a lot of plug-ins and software (including live) are yet to receive full native support. Some will never. And then when rosetta support is dropped it will be through a mac OS update; and you'll probably be able to use your non-updated to the latest mac for a few more years. I'll say you'll still be able to use an usable OS that support rosetta (with security / software updates) in ten years.

[Pitch Black]

Any M1 + Live 11 + Rosetta users care to share their experience?

Either booting/running Live under Rosetta, or running Live as M1-native and instantiating AUs under Rosetta.

Would be interested to hear your observations

[Tarekith]

So far it's been pretty smooth sailing here on an M1 Pro MBP. I've been running the beta in M1 native mode, and most everything works. I had some issues with a few third party plug ins not instantiating correctly a couple betas back, but for the most part it's all working as it should for me now.

All of my plug ins have been updated to be M1 native though, not running anything in Rosetta here.