So, very excited last week, see that Cubase 10 is now compatible with Catalina, shortly followed by Halion and Groove Agent. Yay! Time to upgrade the main Mac to Catalina. Cubase 10 - great. Halion and Groove Agent: can’t get them to run properly, may be me, I’ll spend a bit more time trying to sort them out.
Then: new Yamaha USB driver - awesome! Time for me to start investigating aggregate sound devices with the UR 824 and Apollo Twin, could be very interesting.
Then again: Bam! New Cubase 10.5! Steinberg on a roll! Loads of updates recently, looking good.
Imagine my surprise to find on the website a little article about ‘Cubase 10.5 and compatibility with hardware’. What? Not compatible with the UR 824 in macOS Catalina?? After updating your own USB driver? How did compatibility with your own hardware break between 10 and 10.5?
Shame you didn’t think about mentioning this in the glossy adverts for 10.5. I completely accept it is entirely upon the buyer to check out everything and be cautious. But seriously, I did not expect this. Very disappointing.
Cancel the above. Despite the compatibility warnings on the website, 10.5 DOES work on my system with Catalina: two UR 824s working fine. I should have held my righteous indignation before I actually tried my system. I’m confused about the website information, mind.
Steve.
(Quietly picking up his toys from around the pram and putting them away tidily.)
Aha! Brief update after using the UR 824s on Catalina for a few days.
The dspMixFx only partially works. I can not access the control panel, which is where you set the buffer size for USB operation. You can however access the control panel from within Cubase as normal.
The control panel also sets the clock source. This means I could use my two UR824s as normal through USB connection because I didn’t need to change the clock source. In this setup, one 824 is the master and connects to the computer via usb, the other is set as slave and connects to the first 824 (not the computer) via ADAT ins and outs. This second slave gets its clock source from the first unit.
To use one of the 824s with my Apollo Mk2, I had to access the control panel in order to change the clock source to internal (the Apollo only has one ADAT in, not out, so the Apollo is clocked to the UR824 as slave). I could do this by opening up the dspMixFx application in a Windows machine using the full functionality of the software under Windows. The UR824 then works perfectly with the Apollo.
So for me, the UR824 is fully functional for me when using with Cubase 10.5 on Catalina, because I had a Windows machine to adjust the 824.
You deserve an extra cupcake after nap time! 