Avid ProTools 12.x and Native Instruments with OSX 10.11 (El Capitan)

Avid ProTools 12.x and Native Instruments with OSX 10.11 (El Capitan)

It’s quite disruptive when there is a software upgrade, and I rarely upgrade.  Unfortunately, I had to upgrade for various reasons, so I did.

I installed Avid ProTools 12.4 (I highly discourage this upgrade unless you absolutely have to – as of April 2016 – and if you can stay on 11.3, I would stay there.  Of course that’s my opinion and you can do what you want.  Even 12.5 collaboration is not worth upgrading at this time, it’s a novelty at best, wait and hope for the best that Avid will do the right things to make collaboration actually work better.  It’s just not quite there yet – Maybe in ProTools 14, as I hope they don’t release a ProTools 13.)

Back to my problem statement and the temporary solution:

Problem:

If you have OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) running on your Mac running  ProTools 12.4 (I validated this with HD, HDX, and basic ProTools – with MBox), and using Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S series keyboards, Maschine and/or Traktor, the Native Instruments hardware can be rendered useless except for maybe the keyboard can play notes and pitch bend/mod wheel works.

Note: ProTools 12.5 has the same issue.

Avid and Native Instrument’s suggested solution:

Remove the following file:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/Avid CoreAudio.plugin

Results:

Once you remove that file and start ProTools or other DAWs, you no longer can use your AD/DA hardware (in our case the HD I/O, Apogee Symphony, Focusrite Red, and HD Native and HDX hardware) and you are reduced to using your DAW with the 2 tracks of built-in audio on the Mac.  That is an expensive boat anchor from Avid!  Of course you can rip out all of that Avid HD Native or HDX cards, use Dante or MADI interfaces, and this problem is solved.  That’s not a real solution though.

This is unacceptable in a working studio.  So I did some investigating into the operating system (former hardware and software engineer, with a background in operating systems), and how it was behaving that caused this issue to occur.  Long story short, Avid needs to update their Core Audio plugin/driver because it actually impacts more than Native Instruments hardware products (and can impact other hardware within the computer as well as connected devices.)

Temporary Solution until Avid solves this:

1. Create a temporary directory/folder called Disabled in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL.
2. Move the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file into the newly created Disabled directory/folder.  If you attempt to move it, it will prompt you for a password to proceed, and it will keep the original file (effectively, it will only allow you to copy.)
3. Remove the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL directory/folder.
4. Restart the system.
5. When the system has fully restarted, you can now copy the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file back into the /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL directory/folder.  It  is important that you make a COPY of it and not MOVE it.
6. You can now launch your software that uses Native Instruments hardware (Complete Kontrol S keyboard, Maschine, and/or Traktor) and it will work.
7. Last, before you shutdown the system, you must remove the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file from the /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL directory/folder.  This will also solve the issues of not being able to shutdown their system once upgrading to Avid ProTools 12.4 or later.
8. Next time you restart the system, repeat steps 5 through 7.

This is somewhat of a nuisance, but I have repeated this process many times on various Macs running ProTools HD Native, HDX, and it worked on every system.  I did this test with 10.11.1, 10.11.3, and even 10.11.4 (this version is not supported by Avid as of April 2016) with success.  You can write a script that copies the file from the Disabled directory/folder to HAL directory/folder, and you can write a second script that removes it from the HAL directory/folder before shutting down, but it’s not that difficult to do this manually, and restarts don’t happen often in the studio.

Your mileage may vary, but if this process works for you, I am glad I can share a bit of advice to continue writing music for some of you out there.

I hope Avid or Native Instruments provide a patch or software update to resolve this issue soon.

Cheers!