For those of us watching the reports of the performance of the new Apple Silicon equipped Macs there has been a major impediment to pro audio users wishing to try one of these M1 Macs. The only officially supported DAW is Logic Pro at present but even Logic users would be restricted in their plugin choices until their third party plugins are compatible. Early adopters like FabFilter and Blue Cat Audio are compatible but as so many premium plugins use Pace’s iLok technology unless that is capable of running natively on an Apple Silicon Mac then a very large number of plugins won’t work.

PACE Anti-Piracy today issued the following statement on Rosetta 2 compatibility for all users of their products and services…

“PACE technologies including iLok are Rosetta 2 compliant and have been since end of August.

Since August 24th all developers have had access to Eden 5.3.0 SDKs and end-user software. This release includes many enhancements, these include;

• iLok Cloud improvements

• Service status info for end-users

• Big Sur macOS 11.0 and Xcode 12 support

• Digital signing of arm64 and universal binaries

• Faster logins for large iLok.com accounts

Furthermore, PACE are hard at work on native ARM support and working with all developer partners as they make the transition to new Silicon powered Apple Macs.”

Why Is This Important To Users Considering Buying An Apple Silicon Powered Mac Computer

Whatever you think about PACE and iLok, brands use iLok to protect their investment in developing products.

What this means is that for any software developer, they will need PACE’s software to be able to run natively on Apple Silicon, before they can release a native version.

This includes Pro Tools and many top plugin brands. It may also be the case that other protection systems being employed by different developers may also present similar challenges for the Silicon transition.

Anyone thinking of buying an M1 Mac or any Apple Silicon powered Mac in 2021 you are going to be dependent on Rosetta 2 translation for some time, possibly until the second half of 2021.