Pro Tools doesn't run (at all)

[yyard]

Dear Community,

I am completely new to Pro Tools and was about to check out the Trial. (I've been working with Ableton so far.) So i just downloaded Avid Link and installed Pro Tools via Avid Link. Now when i'm trying to open the Pro Tools, nothing happens (at all!!). The icon jumps up and then nothing. Not even an error notification occurs. I already uninstalled Pro Tools, reinstalled it, updated to Apple Sonoma 14.2.1. but it's still the same. I can't call the support because i don't have any support or serial/product number, since i just want to run the trial. It's been like this for two weeks now. Really weird - any help or hint would be great! Never had an issue like this before.
Thank you.

My macbook is MacBook Air 2020 M1

[inspire]

Hi,
My suggestion is - try to get Pro Tools Intro:
https://my.avid.com/get/pro-tools-in...TkwMS4xNC4wLjA.

[Darryl Ramm]

Hi welcome to DUC.

Trying Pro Tools Intro will likely be a waste of time since it is the exact same software/installer. If Pro Tools only bounces in the dock it is in the early stage of starting up, its not really got to licensing, and if there is a licensing problem it should throw an error.

You don’t see any part of a splash/startup screen appear?

Is your user account name is only one character long? There seems to be a bug where this seems to (ironically) break the Pro Tools crash reporting system, and well causes Pro Tools to crash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If so just skip to creating a new admin account with a longer name and try starting Pro Tools from that account.

If that is not it then something is likely very messed up on your system. I am guessing you likely did an in-situ upgrade to Sonoma, and that just left whatever is messed up in place. You are better off doing clean new installs of macOS when doing major upgrades, especially if doing that to try to solve problems.

And Sonoma is not officially supported with the current 2023.12 Pro Tools release. There are a few known problems, but many of us are running 2023.12 on Sonoma.

An app bouncing in the dock can be caused by problems reaching Apple’s code signing revocation servers often caused by messed up local network settings where it looks like there is a path to the Internet/these servers when there is not. The quick test for this is to disable every network on the Mac. Ethernet on the Mac, Ethernet on expansion docks etc., WiFi, link to iPhones, *everything*. Unplug any related cables from the Mac, go into Settings and make anything that smells like a network is disabled. What happens now? It might just crash faster without the bouncing… but that is some progress.

In addition to trying that. Make sure your user account is not using iCloud home directory/documents storage, that is just prone to causing problems.

And try some of the standard troubleshooting steps under “help us help you” up the top of each DuC web page… specifically try trashing prefs (just use Pete Gate’s free PT Prefs utility to trash prefs https://petegates.com/pgptprefs.html). And while that's unlikely to be the problem since Pro Tools has not go far enough to corrupt prefs, but just always start by trashing prefs (past installs of Pro Tools, other things might cause problems here). And try creating a new Admin account and log in as that user and repeating the test from there. For the Admin account use Settings>General>Login Items to disable any startup apps and background items except those clearly related to Pro Tools. Which should be just "Avid Pro Tools" and "iLok License Manager.app", see the note on Avid Link bloatware below.

If that is not it your fastest path is likely to do a new fully clean macOS install, create a new volume on your existing boot drive if there is room, run the installer on your current system but tell it to install to the new volume when it asks you where to install to. Install there, do the absolute minimal setup and install Pro Tools just see if that works…. If so you can reinstall apps etc. and migrate your user content over to this install, but do not use migration assistant to move apps or drivers.

Avid Link is a bit of a mess of an app and can cause more problems that it is supposed to cure. And it bugs me that it's overly complex bloatware, with a large security attack surface. Not that Pro Tools is sparkly clean there to start with. Unfortunately Pro Tools itself installs Avid Link, so many of us just uninstall Avid Link after each install. You are likely better off managing all this yourself, logging into your Avid.com account, downloading the installer packages from the "My Products" section (click on the Pro Tools product you have and scroll down to see all the individual installers you get... way with Ultimate than just Pro Tools). Keep track of stuff and keep your own plugins etc. up to date, don't rely on Link.

[yyard]

Hey Darrel,

many thanks!!
I finally got Pro Tools running - thanks to your hint; i think the problem must have been icloud related. I created a new user account and installed Pro Tools, with icloud disconnected. It worked :)
I think with my other account there must be a strange issue with my data partly being safed to the cloud. I thought i sorted that out earlier, but apparently something is still off.
Anyway -
I can finally start working now