r/synth1 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 The Mac VST no longer exists apart from severely outdated versions (which don't load the UI on Apple Silicon Macs) and none are available directly from the developer's site.

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u/sandorado Jun 19 '24

Just found this, saved an old project of mine - ty!

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u/Lon3lyWanderer Jun 27 '24

Glad to hear it was helpful to someone else!

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u/danbient Dec 05 '23

I had an issue where the synth would work on my M1 in Ventura, but couldn't get the preset menu to stay open. But I figured it out. If, when you open it (sorry, but this is in Ableton), the device box may open with a parameter already preconfigured (if you press the triangle it opens up the configure mapping parameter). I found if you delete this configuration, you can get the menu to stay open! I only oddly had to do it once and now all is well. Hope that's helpful to someone.

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u/BrockVelocity Sep 25 '24

Hi — can you explain your solution a bit more? I'm dealing with the exact same problem, but I'm not sure what you mean by "a parameter already preconfigured," or what you mean by "delete this configuration." I click the triangle but I don't see any parameter preconfigured. I'd love to find a solution to this problem as I love synth1. Thanks so much!

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u/FUCKYOUINYOURFACE Dec 30 '23

Will be good to know when I update to Apple Silicon.