Pro Tools for multiple users on one Mac

[chrisehyoung]

Long story short, I have 22 brand new M1 iMacs I'm trying to set up in a classroom environment. I need them all to be the same with PT and quite a few plugins. I tried setting up a master Mac the using Time Machine to clone. I also tried using Migration Assistant. Neither one brought all the necessary preferences over and it causing PT loading issues. Ideally I would set them all up with an MDM properly or even set them up individually but I am in a time crunch here.

These will be used by domain users who will not have admin rights. This was set up on the old Intel iMacs but I can't seem to figure out what I missed with the new Macs when setting up. I'm really hoping someone here has some ideas. I'm a little lost right now.

[Ben Jenssen]

There are quite a few aspects to this, but I'll start with what I know;
These macs will have macOS 11 Big Sur or later on them, being M1s. That means they have the 'new' drive setup, with a non-writable system volume (Typically called Macintosh HD) and the 'data' volume (Macintosh HD - Data). You can safely let them all keep the system volume as it is. (I'd make shure that they're all the same version, though.) The Data volume contains everything else; applications, users, documents.

Then, you could start with one mac and create a user, let's say 'Chris' and make it an administator account. Install everything fresh, a 'clean install' is essential IMO, and make shure everything works good.

Then make a disk image from this 'Macintosh HD - Data' with Disk Utilities when booted from 'Recovery'. Save this disk image (".dmg") to a removable drive. Go to the next mac, boot from Recovery by holding the on/off button until 'Options' show. With Disk Utilities, select the existing ' - data' volume and choose 'Restore…', select the .dmg.

This should result in this 2nd mac being identical to the original mac, and the student would have to create a new user account (non-admin, if they don't have the original password), and then be able to use the applications you installed in the first place.

Repeat 20 times.

I'm shure I forget something, but that's the basic outline of how I would do this.

Good luck.


(Migration assistant has always created some problems w/PT, but last time I used it, Only PT had some problem opening sessions, everything else worked fine, and a trashing of PT prefs fixed PT.)

[Ben Jenssen]

Come to think of it; I was assuming that these imacs were all unused and 'unlocked', like new. If they are, then it would be a good idea to lock them to a admin Apple-ID and password - by logging in one time on each and registering the apple-id. and creating a password. Anytime anyone tries to restore a volume or change anything they'd have to have this info. Better not leave the first login to the student. After you've done this, you can erase and administer the macs, like my outline above, and only you.

Another thing is; iLoks. They would all have to have one each, but I'm shure you know that.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by chrisehyoung

Neither one brought all the necessary preferences over and it causing PT loading issues.

What exactly happened? What loading issues? What preferences were not brought over?

The master Mac was one of these identical new M1 macs?

What we normally refer to as preferences are all per-user and live in ~/Library/Preferences/Avid and should have been brought over, if not and the problem is just preferences you could manually drop those as needed. But even more importantly Pro Tools will start up fine with no preferences present. So I'm not at all following what you are talking about. Something about third party plugins or utilities?

What audio interfaces are you using? I don't expect you to have problems with preferences, I do expect you could have problems with device drivers. For M1 Mac security reasons.

Ideally I would set them all up with an MDM properly or even set them up individually but I am in a time crunch here.

You really need me to say this? It sounds like have a current MDM solution for Macs or are familiar with one and you decided to deploy these without that? Come on you know you should have done that to avoid all sorts of problem in future. If you have an MDM solution maybe time to start over instead of troubleshooting stuff. Let me guess... I see Jamf in your future...

[chrisehyoung]

Much appreciated. I'm going to try a restore and see if everything comes over. I had thought about locking down with an Apple ID but wasn't certain about it so thanks for that as well.

[chrisehyoung]

I was dropped into this position 5 weeks before the start of the school year. We are a M365 shop so i'm being directed to Intune for an MDM, I just don't have the time to set it up properly before school starts. This is why i'm looking for a solution to get me through the next couple months then i'll redo things at the Christmas break when I have the proper setup in place.
I'm working on a trial of Addigy as Jamf is just too expensive.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by chrisehyoung

I'm going to try a restore and see if everything comes over.

I can assure you, that unlike Timemachine and Migration Assistant, a volume restore in Disk Utilities will always be a perfect clone. With a good speedy portable SSD it should be pretty fast too. (A 500GB SATA SSD in a cheap enclosure could give you up to 400MB/s and not cost you much more than $100. The restore of '- Data' volume would take a few minutes. Stay away from slow drives and thumb drives, and save time.)

And this could be a thing you find yourself doing more than once to change and improve things.


(Edit: come to think of it, I would get two of those portable drives, so that while I'm setting up the next imac for restore, the last imac will be finishing the previous restore and so on. With the extreme startup times of these machines, you'll have done all 22 in an hour!)

[chrisehyoung]

I have two thunderbolt 3 SSD external drives that I was using for moving drives. They worked really well.

I'm going to create a drive and do some testing this afternoon. Very much appreciate the time and advice.

[Ben Jenssen]

(Select: 'show all volumes' in DU to see the ' - Data' volume. You do not want to clone and restore the whole internal drive.)

[chrisehyoung]

Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen

(Select: 'show all volumes' in DU to see the ' - Data' volume. You do not want to clone and restore the whole internal drive.)

Unfortunately, the option to create image from data is greyed out. As per the Apple support website "Note: You can’t create images of individual APFS volumes. You can’t create images of APFS containers on Mac computers with Apple silicon or an Apple T2 Security Chip.". So once again the T2 chip foils my plans.