New EL CAPITAN operating system

A few days ago I received an email from Native Instruments, some of its products have compatibility issues with this operating system.

Here is the text of the email:

CRITICAL compatibility warning with the upcoming Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan upgrade

Dear Maurizio Marcozzi,

Before upgrading to the latest version of Mac OS X – version 10.11 El Capitan, please consider these potentially serious issues concerning your KOMPLETE, TRAKTOR, and MASCHINE products. Two major issues have been identified:

1. NI plug-ins do not pass the AUDIO UNITS validation in Mac OS X 10.11 – Logic Pro affected

In Mac OS X 10.11, Native Instruments AUDIO UNITS plug-ins will not pass the AU validation and will therefore not be available in Logic Pro. The root cause of this issue has been identified and a solution is currently being developed in close contact with Apple.

2. Incompatibility with some older NI hardware

There are compatibility issues between some older NI devices and Apple’s upcoming operating system. This issue triggers a 'kernel panic' – this serious problem will crash the connected computer immediately, resulting in loss of any unsaved work, or serious disruption of a performance.

The following hardware is affected:

TRAKTOR KONTROL S4 (MK1)

TRAKTOR KONTROL X1 (MK1)

TRAKTOR AUDIO 2 (MK1)

AUDIO 8 DJ

AUDIO 4 DJ

AUDIO 2 DJ

MASCHINE (MK1)

GUITAR RIG 3 (RIG KONTROL 3 hardware)

There are beta drivers already available that fix this issue. Updated drivers will be released as soon as they have been fully tested on OS X 10.11 – shortly after Apple releases OS X 10.11 to the public.

Download the beta drivers here

To keep your system working normally with the affected products, we strongly recommend waiting before upgrading your computer to OS X 10.11 El Capitan until these issues have been fully solved by either Native Instruments or Apple.

It's always like this with new upgrades. You always have to wait many months before non-native software reaches compatibility. Then there are also those like Avid (ProTools, Sibelius, etc.) that have been stagnant for years... As far as I'm concerned, if I decided to upgrade from my old Snow Leopard, I would still choose an OS that is fully stabilized with all the updates (like Mavericks, even if Apple won't let me...).

I am also stuck at 10.7 (Lion) on the Mac Pro where I work with audio.

TheSimon wrote:

I am also stuck at 10.7 (Lion) on the Mac Pro where I work with audio.

This comforts me (if you are, I can be too... ), but the trouble is that many libraries and platforms now require higher OS versions, such as Kontakt and all Native Instruments products; or even 8Dio... These are no small limitations.

Look, on Lion I am using Kontakt 5.2. It is not the most up-to-date version, but all libraries run on it, even the latest releases