OSX High Sierra: 32bit Plugin Server fails to launch (on a APFS drive)

Help, Support & Bugs
1

The above error shows up in my logs after upgrading to 3.2.1 and prevents me from loading most of my AU effects. It happens in both 3.2.1 and 3.2.0 while 3.1.1 (64-bit) works fine. If I try to run the plugin server directly from the command line, this is the output:

I’m running High Sierra 10.13.6 on a case-insensitive APFS drive if that makes a difference. Googling around seems to indicate that this is an issue with file systems. I would temporarily switch to the 32 bit version since most of the AUs I use are 32 bit, but that’s not an option anymore :frowning:

2

I unfortunately don’t have a copy of High Sierra here to verify this, but that seems to be the problem indeed. There’s something fishy with APFS for 32bit applications on High Sierra. Things will work with Renoise 3.1.1 because it was compiled against an older OSX SDK.

So the only workaround we can offer you right now is to continue using Renoise 3.1.1 or trying to update to OSX 10.14. I can’t promise that things work on 10.14 though - it’s just a theory.

You could also try launching Renoise from a non APFS drive, like an external USB drive, but I doubt that this will fix the problem as Renoise needs to access your APFS system drive then anyway.

3

Hi,

you could also use an external usb(3) drive with the same or bigger size of your internal drive, then format it with it with HFS+ journaled, and then 1:1 copy all files with CarbonCopyCloner or the terminal command ditto.

The new drive should simply boot as the internal drive then. Later (after confirming all data is there and the system works 100% on the external drive) you could reformat the internal drive and do the same procedure again.

Since High Sierra works fine with HFS+. Also Mojave does, but Catalina not anymore. A normal full version update (without specific patching of the updater) will convert the drive to APFS again.

4

Thanks for the suggestions. I think my plan for now is to downgrade to 3.1 and plan on reformatting back to HFS at a later point if this bug ends up as a “Won’t Fix” since it seems to be pretty obscure.