Virus TI not compatible with MacOS Catalina / Big Sur

  • Does the Kemper system use the same kind of USB audio system? Perhaps dropping into that forum and asking a few questions might be useful to both sets of users?

    No clue, but it still gets updates:


    https://www.kemper-amps.com/fo…1877-8-0-2-22186-release/

    Indulgence gets us friends, but truth gets us hatred.

    OB-6, Polivoks, Polivoks Pro, Virus TI x2, Waldorf M, MS-20, MS2000, Radias, Minilogue, Minitaur, Argon8, Erebus, Alpha Juno 2, TR-8S, Xio 49, Ultranova, Microfreak,

  • Wow. That’s a lot of updates... if it was like this for the Virus, I‘d probably have to spend more time on installing updates than on playing the instrument... 8o

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+

  • What I would suggest to all Virus users who upgraded their Macs etc is to stop giving a fuck about the whole control integration dog turd etc. Virus excels at sound and that's where its POWER. Use Sysex librarian to transfer patches, and use basic Midi to interconnect with your daw.

    There might be some weird and unexpected stuff going on at the company which we can't know for sure, focus on making music, Virus is the best synth. My Polar bad boy makes me very happy and cures my depression, even more so than Playstation 5 lol.

    Godspeed!

  • What I would suggest to all Virus users who upgraded their Macs etc is to stop giving a fuck about the whole control integration dog turd etc. Virus excels at sound and that's where its POWER. Use Sysex librarian to transfer patches, and use basic Midi to interconnect with your daw.

    There might be some weird and unexpected stuff going on at the company which we can't know for sure, focus on making music, Virus is the best synth. My Polar bad boy makes me very happy and cures my depression, even more so than Playstation 5 lol.

    Godspeed!

    Indeed. Life goes on ... even though Access' behavior (or better: non-behavior) is embarrassing. Being a German but not involved in the company, I even feel shame. We got a word for it: "Fremdschämen" (feeling ashamed on someone else's behavior ....)


    Nevertheless, please could you share your setup ? I would be interested in the interfaces (MIDI, Audio) and the software you are using. Do you experience any problems with your setup ?


    I am still on MacOS High Sierra where my TI Polar works fine, but I will get a new Mac soon. I thought about a combination of a Behringer UMC1820 (for the 6 audio channels plus MIDI) and the Mystery Islands "Access VirusHC AudioUnit & VSTi Librarian Editor Plug-in".


    Your answer will be highly appreciated !!

  • What I would suggest to all Virus users who upgraded their Macs etc is to stop giving a fuck about the whole control integration dog turd etc. Virus excels at sound and that's where its POWER. Use Sysex librarian to transfer patches, and use basic Midi to interconnect with your daw.

    There might be some weird and unexpected stuff going on at the company which we can't know for sure, focus on making music, Virus is the best synth. My Polar bad boy makes me very happy and cures my depression, even more so than Playstation 5 lol.

    Godspeed!


    Problem is more the non communication and that they still sell the Virus with the promise of integration with MacOS. If they openly communicated that they stopped supporting MacOS and removed it from their advertisement, I would understand.


    The most frustrating part about the support if you email them, you get an message back they do very secretly about the continuing support? The audio driver has been send to them from the third party audio interface that is in the virus, but somehow they don't do anything.


    As more people here like myself has offered to write plugin for MacOS Catalina, Big Sur ect; If they would open source the code.

  • Well maybe all should start posting on the kemper forums and start asking questions there? Nobody is replying here from the company, it feels like a ghost town of abandoned virus users...

    Another option is to ask our questions and share our disappointment on their Kemper social network, like Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kemperamps_official


    This way we can let possible Kemper buyers know that Access/Kemper is ignoring their customers.

  • I've had contact with the Access team about the issue of Virus TI2 and the latest version of Mac OS (Catalina / Big Sur).

    Unfortunately they couldn't give my any news regards to the compatibility issues at this point.


    I've also asked them if it might be an option to make the driver open source so community enthousiast can help within

    the development. They didn't respond on this one :(


    It looks like we need to wait until....(nobody knows) and hope there will be an update someday...(or not).

  • Well this is the issue I have with it, they give a non answer. If they are stopping the "access brand", just tell us, we can deal with it. The problem I have is the communication is SHIT. If they told us, they are working on something but really need time, that would give comfort to know they aren't forgetting us.


    The other problem I have is that the TI2 is still sold as "Total integration on MacOS", something that is far from the truth. It's misleading and enough to sue them over it.


    They could have fixed it in maybe one week of programming, it is a simple as replacing the audio driver (Ploytec already provided it) and fix the hard crash on Big Sur.

  • I would assume they're just selling through remaining stock that they have. As I see it they have a number of hard problems to solve:

    • the dsp chips are discontinued
    • they've apparently licensed/used some proprietary components for the integration bits which means they may be unable to open source the TI software
    • they got obsessed with high end guitar gear and in the meantime the synth industry has completely changed, analog dominates the top-end, there are some very advanced digital synths as well, and people seem to care less about integration and massive multi-timbrality. Synths like the peak, iridium/quantumn, etc are selling like hotcakes at much lower prices than Virus.
    • VSTs like u-He, Serum and Arturia et all are arguably much better as a native solution than anything available 20 years ago


    It's no mistake they discontinued the TI Snow - they're kind of useless without TI ( or much reduced ) and that's a bummer.

  • it is a simple as replacing the audio driver (Ploytec already provided it) and fix the hard crash on Big Sur.

    Since you're programmer, have you actually taken a look at the error report Logic Pro gives you after failing to verify the Virus TI plugin in Big Sur?

    If so, what did you get from that? I'm not a programmer myself but I have looked at it and it's a very long list referring all kinds of MacOS frameworks it can't find at the referred place.

    OK, so audio via USB doesn't work because of the lack of HAL plugins (Just like the Philips Hue sync App, which is a shit app anyway :p) but those other frameworks.. I think most of them still exist within Big Sur, but simply on another (secure) location. Probably the boot drive.. Could it be that the plugin doesn't get access to it because it needs write permissions, which it definitely won't get in Big Sur, even in SIP mode.. What's your view on this?

  • The weird thing about Big Sur is, that it recognizes the Virus TI (6 inputs and 2 outputs), it seems like there is a native audio drivers for the Ploytec audio interface.


    I am going to experiment some more, but for now I couldn't get any audio from the Virus trough usb.

    Has anyone tried installing the vanilla Ploytec Mac USB driver on Catalina? My DAW is still running Mojave so I can't test.


    Demo driver is here:

    https://www.usb-audio.com/download/


    I understand Catalina doesn't support HAL plugins - but the comments on their download page just say the following:

    "(For Mac OS X 10.13 - 10.15 see the support page. Mac OS X 10.15 no longer supports HAL plugins: Catalina Release Notes. On Mac OS X 10.15 the driver is CoreAudio only."


    So 10.15 seems to be supported with this version - and I think all they are saying it's been reworked to not be a HAL plugin? However I'm not clear. Anyone?

  • Synths like the peak, iridium/quantumn, etc are selling like hotcakes at much lower prices than Virus

    Today’s prices at Thomann:
    - 2144 EUR Waldorf Iridium
    - 1799 EUR Waldorf Kyra
    - 1665 EUR Acess Virus TI Desktop


    Today’s sales ranks at Thomann:

    - 17 Waldorf Iridium
    - 21 Acess Virus TI Desktop
    - 63 Waldorf Kyra


    Just some facts.

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+

  • I just bought a Virus TI2 keyboard and messed around for 2 hours on my Mac big sur operating system trying to download the updater software and got absolutely nowhere, my Mac would not no matter how I tried everything let me open the updater. Anyway I've sent an email or 2 and just plugged in and played and bugger me I have to say it sounds fantastic. Ive been on Analogue stuff for the past 8 years and forgot how superb digital can sound, reminds me of my old Waldorf Q.


    I have a Quantum and its amazing too, but this is extremely impressive so far. Just a shame they are not on the ball with the software updates.

  • I do keep considering getting to grips with Mac/Windows development tools and writing a stand-alone editor. I did similar back in the day, on the Amiga. I have the Mystery Islands plug-in, but really doesn't sit well with me.

    I've just never had time to properly get to grips with Xcode and Visual Studio, despite being a software engineer for decades. I've only ever worked on embedded / real-time systems though.


    Anyone else interested in looking at this? Since I'm mostly on Mac, in my case - Xcode is probably my starting point.

    The Midi APIs don't look too bad. The difficulty might be more in terms of GUI resources for knobs and sliders etc. How much would I/we want to use an off-the-shelf framework, and how much would I/we want to write something new. I've had a play around with JUCE, but there are some aspects which didn't really sit well with me.


    Any good open-source starting points?

    Heck - we could potentially even crowd-fund for an experienced developer to start the work for us! Something which could be community maintained.

  • Here's an interesting potential starting point for a slider component. I have a Waldorf Blofeld editor, which just uses this in-built slider for its GUI and it seems to work OK. This is for iOS, but the underlying stuff should be the same.

    https://codewithchris.com/uislider-tutorial-ios-slider/

    That tutorial above is a bit out-of-date for the latest Xcode, but I have a slider for values working with values 0 to 127. Cobbling together some of this might give me a starting point.

  • Yep.


    I had a dig around in the Virus audio driver binary files and Ploytec are indeed in there. 'PloytecHalPluginType' for example and that's why it's not working in Catalina. HAL Audio has been depreciated, doesn't exist in Catalina. Ploytec have to move to a different method called 'Audio Server' instead. This has been around since macOS 10.9 by the way, it's not a new thing! Ploytec do state that "We'll release a CoreAudio-only driver by late 2019" for their commercial USB Audio driver so, fingers crossed, they will also update the Virus drivers on behalf of Access Music as well.


    Hope that helps.

    And PloyTec have already released a Catalina compatible Core Audio only driver. I posted about it previously.


    https://www.usb-audio.com/download/


    (For Mac OS X 10.13 - 10.15 see the support page. Mac OS X 10.15 no longer supports HAL plugins: Catalina Release Notes. On Mac OS X 10.15 the driver is CoreAudio only.


    I'm curious whether it actually needs integrating into the Access Plugin - or we can just install the vanilla audio driver and at least pass audio.

  • And PloyTec have already released a Catalina compatible Core Audio only driver. I posted about it previously.


    https://www.usb-audio.com/download/

    and on the same page, further down, they state:


    macOS Big Sur 11 no longer loads kernel extensions, it's not possible to provide an update for Big Sur. Still, we have plans to keep the driver updated for earlier versions of Mac OS X.


    So, that’s the end of the TI on macOS.

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+