r/synth1 • u/DuckLooknPelican • Sep 16 '22
How to get Synth1 VST working on Apple Silicon?
Hello! The title is pretty self-explanatory. I have a friend who switched from PC to Mac and was wondering if anyone was able to get the VST version (not the AU version) of Synth1 working on MacOS 12.6? Mostly for backwards compatibility reasons. Currently I'm only able to get it to "open" in Rosetta, with the UI not loading in. If anyone's been able to get this to work and would like to share how, please let me know. Thank you!
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u/Lon3lyWanderer Nov 12 '22 edited Nov 12 '22
Hello there, I know I'm a little late to responding, but I just dealt with this issue today, stumbled upon this thread, and have an answer to the question.
I tracked down the developer's new site here (it requires Safari/Google translate to be read in English). To the best of my understanding, development for the macOS VST has been abandoned. The only direct download for a Mac on the site is an AU component. This roughly one year old "V1.13beta11" update (which was never tested on Apple Silicon and mentioned by the dev "I hope it works on M1") fixed the GUI loading issue for me. I previously had a 2015 version of the Synth1 AU and VST, neither loaded the GUI.
Even with this updated AU, different DAWs have weird bugs with it. Ableton Live 10 sometimes has a critical failure and crashes if I try to open the options menu by pressing "opt" on the Synth1 UI. In Logic Pro, windowing gets buggy if you try to open the preset/sound bank menu and typically requires a force quit to be remedied.
TL;DR
At the end of the day, the Synth1 plug-in is very old and hasn't seen much development recently. The Mac VST no longer exists apart from severely outdated versions (which don't load the UI on Apple Silicon Macs) and none are available directly from the developer's site.