Last week Apple released the new macOS, High Sierra (10.13). A few issues have popped up for Garritan products on computers running the new OS.
Garritan Installer Issues in macOS High Sierra
With the exception of Abbey Road Studios CFX Lite, the installers included with all current Garritan products can hang during install on High Sierra. This problem began intermittently in earlier macOS versions. While the installation goes smoothly for some users, we’ve observed that the hanging behavior has become more prevalent with the latest release. Due to the intermittent nature of this issue, some users have had success simply starting the installation over again.
We are actively testing a solution for this problem, which involves building new installers for each product. We’ve already updated Garritan Instruments for Finale, the sample library included with Finale; this was included in our most recent Finale installer just last week. The next installer will be an update to Personal Orchestra 5, followed by all other products currently available at garritan.com.
Note that if you have already installed Garritan products on your Mac prior to upgrading to High Sierra, you will not experience these installer issues.
Standalone CFX Player
While the CFX library works fine with the ARIA Player in High Sierra, the standalone CFX Player (typically used for live performance) crashes if you open the Preferences dialog and then close it. We’re actively looking into this issue as well. More details can be found in this knowledge base article, which will be updated as we learn more.
Problems with Logic and GarageBand
Due to a change in the underlying architecture of macOS components, many Audio Units plug-ins no longer function correctly within Apple products such as Logic and GarageBand running on High Sierra. This includes all Garritan products. Specifically, the ARIA Player and the CFX Player plug-ins may not appear as available plug-ins in these hosts or may produce error messages.
This issue is not unique to Garritan (it seems fairly pervasive); it will require many manufacturers to update their plug-ins, and may take us a little longer to sort out.
What You Can Do Today
To be clear, with the possible exception of the installer issue, these problems only impact people running the latest macOS. If you are not using High Sierra yet, you can avoid these problems by postponing the update. In the meantime, rest assured: we’re on it.
Jon Tschiggfrie joined MakeMusic’s Customer Success team in 2011 and today is the product manager for audio/notation, which includes all Garritan products. Jon’s focus is on discovering what users of virtual instruments really want to accomplish and on envisioning the improved solutions that might actually help people make that kind of progress.