Posts by reno

Quote from DJTobes

However...... I did get a notice on the Mac today saying that the Virus Ti MIDI Driver is 32 bit and so it won't work after the next macOS update... this is worrying! So, what's the latest news about a full 64 bit macOS version of the Virus Ti2 software please? Thanks.

EDIT: It appears that the /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/de.access-music.virus_ti.plugin/Contents/MacOS/de.access-music.virus_ti - is 32 bit and also the /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/Virus TI MIDI Driver.plugin/Contents/MacOS/Virus TI MIDI Driver as part of the MIDIServer process is also 32 bit.

Mark? Can you advise please Sir? Thanks man.

This was written 1 year ago and the latest release 5.1.7 is from 2017.

So, I suppose this means that in addition to VCC, there is no longer USB Midi support in macOS 10.15, correct ?

Quote from oliAtBass

Wait. Does theat mean in the future macOS versions, we will:

• not be able to Backup and Restore our Virus TI
• not be able to Reset our Virus TI to factory settings
• not be able to Write ROM Banks to our Virus TI
• not be able to Update our Virus TI

That's a bummer!

Marc, can you please confirm if the above is true ?

At the very least being able to apply Virus updates seems critical to me (especially as the drivers and Virus firmware versions need to match)

Is macOS officially not supported anymore for this feature ?

Could you please come up with a minimal firmware updater maybe ?

Or even open source VCC and let the community deal with it if you don't have the resources.

Besides VCC, can you please confirm if Virus Control + audio/midi drivers are all 64 bit and work fine in macOS 10.15 (the final beta of which has been released yesterday) ?

Hi,

I'm the owner of a rare limited edition Whiteout Virus TI2 keyboard (just 150 made !)

[Blocked Image: https://i.imgur.com/rw3QSnQ.jpg]
I've put it up for sale on eBay (auction ends tomorrow) but I'm now having second thoughts : I don't really need the money urgently, I just need the studio space and I've actually bought a smaller TI2 Polar to replace it (never want to be without a Virus, and the Polar was my first Virus, I'm in love with it and its form factor !)

I've set the auction price relatively high compared to a regular TI2 keyboard so at least I don't have too many regrets if it sells, but I'm thinking of just removing it and selling the Polar instead !

What would you do in my shoes ?
I actually love the Polar better (again it's my first Virus and there's an emotional attachment to it), but will these rare Whiteout units appeal to collectors years from now ?

Guys, I am seeing the one minute freeze thing on High Sierra also with something completely unrelated to the Virus (my Canon scanner software).
So, this may just be on my system. But if someone has seen anything similar when launching Virus Control, please let me know so we can troubleshoot, as it's quite annoying.

Quote from oliAtBass

FYI, official announcement by Steinberg:

Which means, Access (and any other plugin developer) can start their final testing way after that. Ain't that fun!

Thanks. Absolutely insane.

But it's encouraging that most other big names in the audio industry are not pretending that High Sierra doesn't exist until tomorrow : they have done their job as they should and are ready on day 1 with official statements. Especially hardware companies (RME, Apogee, Line 6, Focusrite, M-Audio... ), but also major plug-in publishers like Arturia :
https://www.sweetwater.com/swe…ompatibility-information/

Quote from ChrisCabbage

Which Mac are you using reno?

It's a 2015 Macbook Pro but that shouldn't matter, it's not freezing for a full minute because the computer is slow

Ok, I have been able to do a first quick test with 10.13 and there is good and bad news

The bad news is that starting Virus Control freezes the DAW with 100% CPU for ~1 minute, before finally the plug-in window appears with "starting up"
I have tested this with the latest 64bit versions of both Logic Pro and Ableton Live, and with both VST and AU on Live.
I have the console logs with lots of "VTLIB" messages from the plug-in, if that is helpful for Access engineers (should I write to support ?)

The good news is that Virus Control seems to work fine once it has managed to start.

I haven't been able to test the audio interface functionality, but at least both interfaces (CoreAudio and Bit Accurate) show up normally in Audio MIDI Setup.

I must say that I had not used the Virus for a long time with the computer I tested this with, so there is a small chance that the problems could have been here before upgrading to 10.13, but in any case this is the first time I have seen this issue.

Here we are, the final macOS 10.13 version has just been released tonight to developers and public beta testers.
It will be released to regular customers on September 25th.
I'm hoping someone can report back on Virus TI driver + Virus control compatibility.

Quote from TNM

The problem though Marc is, our DAW manufacturers. They are forcing us on MAC at least, to be cutting edge with our OS. I am lucky with pro tools in that 10.10 is still supported even with PT 12.8, but i am sure V13 will drop it.

Apple has made 10.11 mandatory for a point update of logic. A point update! 12.3!

steinberg will make 10.12 mandatory for cubase 9.5, and 10.13 for cubase 10, and so on.

And ? Why is that a problem to you ? Upgrading macOS is free.

Have you thought that there may be very good reasons why the software world works this way ?
New OSes bring changes that make developers' lives easier, and small companies just don't have the resources to maintain 2 versions of their software, one using the new way and the other the old way of doing things.

If you refuse to upgrade your OS, then just use the older versions of DAWs but please don't ask developers to double their amount of work just so they please customers who hate upgrading (for mostly irrational reasons).

Quote from Marc

@TNM usually the DAW manufacturers need time to get their software ready for an upcoming new OS. that's another reason why plug-in manufacturers are sometimes behind the curve.we have to wait for the DAWs to be compatible in order to perform real world tests on our software.

That is true if you think you cannot give customers anything less than a 100% guaranteed certification for a specific OS/DAW version combination.

In practice, I think people are much happier if given something that "should work" asap (as a public beta maybe) and will be fully tested and certified later when all DAWs are released, rather than being stuck with nothing until you believe you have aerospace/banking/nuclear power plants levels of software quality

That is especially true when the problems have nothing to do with third party software like DAWs.

Last year's Virus driver problem with Sierra was just a software packaging / signature issue that was reproducible and completely fixable since June (and caused by the use of a packaging format that was deprecated for several YEARS : Sierra only started to enforce the deprecation for real)

Quote from Marc

reno, there is absolutely no reason to install 10.13 once it's out. i doubt that anybody in the entire audio industry will recommend you to update instantly. our recommendation is: wait until everything you need is compatible.

Marc, I know your recommendation.

All I'm saying is that nowadays there is absolutely no technical reason for most software not to be compatible on day 1, so it is annoying to hear this stated as a fact of life that people should just deal with. That is simply not true.

Again, not to rub this in your face but last year, the 10.12 incompatibility with the Virus driver was visible since June (3 months before Sierra release) and it was a 2 hours job to fix (I know, I did a workaround which dealt with the root cause). Yet the fix was released 2 months after Sierra came out. That's 5 months in total.

I don't want to blame smaller companies who feel safer to wait until the final release to avoid unnecessary work. But any experienced developer can tell the difference between a bug that Apple might still fix before release, and a documented deprecation / API change that will NOT go away, and should be put on the todo list asap.

You can't know all of the various situations that require people to upgrade (the most obvious one of course is getting a new computer !), it's not fair to tell them what they should do or shouldn't do, when you actually have a chance to prevent any problems from your end.

This is not a rant against Access, this attitude is widespread in the audio industry (in contrast, in the rest of the software world I'm already seeing 10.13 updates for apps even from very small development shops !). But again, waiting has very rarely a good justification. It's just a bad habit.

I'm happy that you said things look good so far, which presumably means that this year you guys have already started testing

Hi Marc,

I'm happy to hear that all looks good so far !

The official release date for macOS 10.13 at this time is "Fall", and in recent years that has always meant September.

There is no final version but as you know, 99% of the time any breaking changes will be present from the first developer preview released in June, because most of them are API and deprecation changes that Apple will never ever go back on, so they're safe to start working on when problems do arise. Apple's developer preview program starts in June for this purpose, and I have seen compatibility updates from several apps I use already.

Last year for Sierra, you released a public beta with a fix on November 9th, but the root problem that caused the Virus driver incompatibility was present in the first Sierra beta in June and being discussed on developer forums as early as June 28th :
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/50380

I was just hoping that you would do better this year, and I must respectfully point out that not everyone (not even many laptop-touring professionals I know) has a separate dedicated audio workstation to work with, and as a developer you cannot just expect your customers to remain isolated from everything else that happens in the software world, when Apple gave you a chance to be ready on day 1. For people getting new computers, not upgrading isn't even a choice they have.

Anyways, long live the Virus !

So, macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" has been available for developers to test since June 5th, and we're a little under 2 months from release now.

I'm already seeing many compatibility fixes being released for various apps.

Has anyone tested Virus Control + drivers with it yet ? Hopefully Access is already on the case ?

Quote from Marc

haha

It's rather obvious why this won't happen for the DSP code, but in all seriousness, what about Virus Control + as much of the drivers as possible (I understand you rely on a 3rd party for part of the audio driver, which btw caused the macOS Sierra compatibility debacle, but ...) ?
This is the only way to make Total Integration 100% future proof for users, regardless of what happens in the coming decades.

Quote from Marc

the plug-ins etc will be overwritten, tweaks on macOS are outside the scope of our software or the installer. we are not testing against the workaround published here.

As you must have seen Marc, the workaround acted on the driver file itself, no other macOS tweak was needed.
So the new installer just overwrites the old driver, there is nothing else to test against.

Quote from kilow

I hope it will not clash with version with workaround steps applied.

No, the new driver will just overwrite the file that we manually fixed in the workaround.

Quote from skittb123

hm weird, disabling the SIP, running your terminal lines again, and then enabling the SIP again, makes the virus work.
Now when I run ''ls -l /Library/Extensions/AccessVirusTI.kext/Contents/MacOS/AccessVirusTI'' it does say ''root wheel 406960'', instead of root wheel 842884

Hmm interesting, if the size was "842884" then it definitely didn't work. Did the line with "ditto" give you any error messages when you tried ?
That could mean that *on a fresh install only*, SIP prevents you from making manual changes like this inside /Library/Extensions... so you'd need to disable it temporarily.
However, this is a very weird theory and I don't believe it's the real explanation (I definitely had SIP enabled when I did this hack).
Are you sure you didn't make a typo when you tried at first ?

Anyway, time to watch the Apple keynote with the new Macbook Pros now

Quote from skittb123

I did a fresh 10.12.1 Install today. tried your hack, and it doesn't work anymore.

It would be very surprising that a fresh install (or even 10.12.1 compared to 10.12.0) makes any difference.
Did you use the same Virus driver installer, 5.1.3.0v2 ?
What do you mean doesn't work, any errors ?
What do "ls -l /Library/Extensions/AccessVirusTI.kext/Contents/MacOS/AccessVirusTI" and "file /Library/Extensions/AccessVirusTI.kext/Contents/MacOS/AccessVirusTI" say ?
You should see "-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 406960" and "Mach-O 64-bit kext bundle x86_64", respectively

Quote from ChrisCabbage

Good work! Might also be worth finding out if the newly released 10.12.1 has any impact on this. There's a chance that the driver loading might be more clever in the new version.

Just tested, the fix still works in 10.12.1.
Haven't tried without the fix but very unlikely there will be any difference from 10.12.0 : if you look at the Apple forum post I linked to above, the change in Sierra is intentional.

"When the 64-bit kernel was announced, the WWDC session pointed out that such kexts were not supported and two kexts should be shipped instead.
Now that strict code signing validation is being done on kexts, these unsupported kexts will fail signature verification."

(kexts = drivers in Apple parlance)
Basically it means that the 32+64 bit flavours of the Virus driver were packaged together in an unsupported way when 64-bit compatibility was added (6 years ago for 10.6 Snow Leopard), but Apple didn't mind too much about that until Sierra, where they tightened security even more.

It would have been nice of Apple to warn developers that this was going to be enforced strictly from 10.12 (maybe they did ?), on the other hand they probably can't announce every small change, and this is why there's a June-September beta testing season Again I don't want to hammer the point home too much (especially since Access is waiting for a third party), but look at the date of that Apple guy's post explaining the problem and the fix : June 28th.

Right, following that Apple forum post I mentioned above, I've just found a fix for the driver itself that doesn't require disabling SIP : http://www.virus.info/forum/in…r-macOS-Sierra-10-12-FIX/

Hi,

In the other threads about macOS Sierra, I was among the people loudly complaining that this should have been tested and fixed earlier, blah blah blah...
Much better than whining is trying to help, so here's my contribution which I think fixes the problem properly, until Access can release a nicely packaged fix.

Much of the credit goes to "skittb123" for finding out that the issue had to do with SIP and offering an initial workaround, which put me on the right track !
A bit of searching on the Apple developer forums gives the root cause of the problem that Access / Ploytec will have to fix : https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/50380
In the meantime, we can do a quick fix ourselves in a few minutes.

The following procedure fixes the driver itself, it is a much cleaner solution than disabling SIP on the entire Mac (which can leave it more vulnerable to malware)
Disclaimer : I have no link with Access (other than being a faithful customer) and this is done at your own risk. There is not much risk, though
If you have a very old (probably before 2009, check here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201948) 32-bit Mac, then you'll need to replace "x86_64" in step 5 below with "i386" :

1. Install the Virus TI Installer 5.1.3.0
2. Open the Terminal app
3. Copy/paste the following commands exactly as shown and type return after each. Enter your Mac password when you're asked to.
4. First let's backup the original driver file, just in case :

5. Then let's fix it by keeping only the 64bit part of the driver :

6. That's it ! Plug-in your Virus TI and enjoy.
7. If for some reason you want to revert to the original state, either reinstall the Virus driver, or do this to restore from our earlier backup :

(Ironically, not tested with my actual Virus TI yet since I'm away from home, but I can confirm that the driver loads after this procedure and it should be all that's needed !)