Eventide 2016 Stereo Room AAX Mac: should run Apple Silicon, does not.

[MixerGuy]

Eventide 2016 Stereo Room AAX Mac: should run Apple Silicon, does not.

I have emailed Eventide support… but i thought i’d ask about this here as well…

I own Eventide 2016 Stereo Room AAX Mac - it runs fine on my Intel Mac Pro.

In the release notes at this Eventide web page

https://www.eventideaudio.com/downlo...0Stereo%20Room

…. it clearly states that it should run Apple Silicon….. AAX Mac….
but I have run the installer on my Apple Silicon Mac Studio, and the installer runs, and seems to install and complete,
but In the current version of ProTools on my Apple Silicon Mac Studio, the plugin does not appear. I can’t instantiate it. It does not exist. It did not install.

I know on the Eventide page for 2016 Stereo Room it says
“Please note this product has been replaced with the new SP2016 Reverb Plug-in”

but they want $249 for this SP2016 Reverb Plug-in !?
I already own the Eventide 2016 Stereo Room. and it does not seem to work on Apple Silicon, even thought the release notes clearly indicate it should. :-/

I did find a $99 crossgrade option... but that seems like a bit of a rip off, all things considered. :-/

[Darryl Ramm]

This is a little fuzzy wishful thinking. The answer is obvious that it's Intel only, and all this stuff has been covered to death on DUC so many times.

The plugin won't run, that is a big clue the plugin is Intel only.

The "it will run on Apple Silicon" means just that it will run under Rosetta 2, not that it's a native port to Apple silicon. This was the case with so many plugins during the plug in vendors transition to Apple Silicon native support.

The plugin *did* install and it *does* exist, you can see its .aaxplugin file in the plugin folder if you look. The reason it won't load in Pro Tools is it's an Intel only plugin. It is not working exactly as expected.

And as posted here many times, the test you should always just do is look at the plugins with Pete Gate's PT Prefs 2, which will show clearly if a plugin is Intel only (x64) or also supports Apple Silicon (Universal).

Even the age of this should give you a clue, the installer app is from August 2022, before there was even beta Apple silicon native support in Pro Tools and so no plugins shipped from any vendor with apple silicon support.

You need to find an option to upgrade the plugin or you need to run Pro Tools under Rosetta.

[MixerGuy]

yeah, ok, i get your points.....

i was momentarily confused by the release notes.... screen grab attached.....

and like SO many plugin manufacturers... if they would include more complete compatibility info... the world would be a better place.

meaning, if they'd actually state "works Intel only, not Apple Silicon" on their web pages, life would be easier.

for example - they make no clear mention of Apple Silicon compatibility (or not) at the bottom. nor in the release notes.

https://www.eventideaudio.com/plug-i...6-stereo-room/

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

This is a little fuzzy wishful thinking. The answer is obvious that it's Intel only, and all this stuff has been covered to death on DUC so many times.

The plugin won't run, that is a big clue the plugin is Intel only.

The "it will run on Apple Silicon" means just that it will run under Rosetta 2, not that it's a native port to Apple silicon. This was the case with so many plugins during the plug in vendors transition to Apple Silicon native support.

The plugin *did* install and it *does* exist, you can see its .aaxplugin file in the plugin folder if you look. The reason it won't load in Pro Tools is it's an Intel only plugin. It is not working exactly as expected.

And as posted here many times, the test you should always just do is look at the plugins with Pete Gate's PT Prefs 2, which will show clearly if a plugin is Intel only (x64) or also supports Apple Silicon (Universal).

Even the age of this should give you a clue, the installer app is from August 2022, before there was even beta Apple silicon native support in Pro Tools and so no plugins shipped from any vendor with apple silicon support.

You need to find an option to upgrade the plugin or you need to run Pro Tools under Rosetta.

[Darryl Ramm]

Many plugin vendors made awfully sloppy announcements about plugin compatibility under Rosetta and did not go back and clarify them once native Apple silicon support was even possible, so the real test is to use PT Prefs 2 to check what the plugins actually are. Pete Gates was nice enough to add back in that capability to check plugins info to PT Prefs ready for this transition to Apple silicon.

---

As for the bug mention...

The installer software itself that installs these plugins is crappy code from VMware. The installer has separate Intel and Apple silicon binaries with the correct version launched from a script. It should just use a universal binary with both architecture binary code packaged in one executable file, and it does not. And that's likely the root cause of there being a bug fix for the script running the wrong installer binary under Rosetta.

Eventide would be much better off if they used standard macOS pkg installers with universal binaries in them instead of this crappy VMware installer. What a bad software advertisement about the quality of your software engineering team to be packaging modern Mac software using this crap.

But anyway that installer will install a bunch of different types of plugins, many of which were likely universal, except for the AAX plugins, and the installer code itself could run natively on Intel or Apple silicon (when the installer was not broken).

Sigh, VMware, a now sadly defunct company, I helped get started (I have no idea why they developed an installer, it may have been in response to frustrations with InstallShield on Windows, and happened a lot time ago, no excuse to be using it today on Mac.).

[thin ice]

If you want to run native Silicon, there will be sacrifices along the way. The gains with Apple Silicon were so good, I'm really not that bothered about using Rosetta for some time to come.

[Eric Lambert]

I emailed them about an ETA for the silicon version of this plugin and they recommended that I buy the SP2016 Reverb, which is its replacement. It wasn't the answer I was hoping for, but it sounds like there isn't going to be any Silicon update.

[Imagine]

According to their website, it specifies:

Please note this product has been replaced with the new SP2016 Reverb Plug-in.

[CygnusX-1Bk2]

If memory serves the Stereo Room version was a freebie... The 2016 Reverb is on sale for $129 right now. I got it last year from Audio Deluxe for $60 after discount codes. The default setting is Stereo Room...

If you have it as a VST3 then you might try to use something like MetaPlug to run it in PT. The latest MetaPlug is ARM AAX Native. It's only $35.

[Darryl Ramm]

And you can pick up Anthology XII for $799 now (which includes SP2016) and maybe lower cost at other times. And you get credit off that for plugins in Anthology you already own. And if you have some freebie plugins (e.g. like Channel Strip in the past) that counts to reducing the Anthology XII price.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by CygnusX-1Bk2

If memory serves the Stereo Room version was a freebie

I definitely paid for it, and I seem to recall that it wasn't cheap. This was several years ago.