Native Instruments warns macOS Big Sur can damage its music hardware

Native Instruments, maker of audio devices such as four-channel DJ controllers, has warned users that macOS Big Sur can potentially physically damage equipment.

Musicians have already told AppleInsider that they plan to wait before moving to Apple Silicon Macs, but now a music company is telling users not to update to macOS Big Sur either.

"Using a Traktor Kontrol S4 Mk3 on macOS 11 (Big Sur) can cause malfunction and potentially damage your controller!" says the company in its certain older products">support pages. "We are working together with Apple to find a solution to this problem."

Although the company does not specify how macOS can damage this particular popular device, it does go into more detail for the rest of its range. "Using a Maschine Mk2 or Mikro Mk2... can cause high CPU spikes on your computer," it says.

"Using a Komplete Audio 1, Komplete Audio 2, or Komplete Audio 6 Mk2... can cause CPU spikes and distortion with sample rates above 172kHz," it continues. "This can be avoided by selecting large buffer sizes (2000ms)."

Separately, the company notes that certain older products are not compatible with macOS Big Sur.

There's no information about compatibility with Apple Silicon M1 Macs. The company does not disclose in what form it is working with Apple, nor whether this has been taking place during the extended beta period.

This is not, however, the first time that Native Instruments has had issues with macOS updates. It previously took time to support Apple's Music app, which replaced the previous iTunes.

Similarly, Native Instruments and other music hardware companies initially found problems with Apple's T2 security chip. That was reportedly a glitch that Apple later addressed.

13 Comments

rob53 3312 comments · 13 Years

About 4 years ago

Would have been nice to announce this information before Big Sur was released but maybe they did directly to current users.

pizzaboxmac 34 comments · 4 Years

Native Instruments has had how long to figure this out? Come on.

spheric 2705 comments · 9 Years

pizzaboxmac said:

Native Instruments has had how long to figure this out? Come on.

Because Native Instruments have unlimited resources and only four major hardware lines and several dozen major plug-ins to support on all platforms, while Big Sur only hit Golden Master a few weeks ago — and it seems like the problem might actually be on APPLE's side?

Yeah, come on.

jdb8167 626 comments · 16 Years

Sounds like a hardware problem ... for Native Instruments. There should be no way any digital input should damage peripheral hardware (different if it is analog).

jdb8167 said:

Sounds like a hardware problem ... for Native Instruments. There should be no way any digital input should damage peripheral hardware (different if it is analog).

*should* is correct.

However, if there is some unfixable design flaw that could damage the hardware (I've seen synthesizers permanently bricked by sending the wrong kind of Sysex data via MIDI, resulting in Boot Flash corruption that required replacement*), and Apple's update is sending spurious, errant data that it shouldn't be, then the problem is indeed Apple's to fix.

It's sort of like if I forget to lock my front door and a burglar just walks in and steals stuff — yes, I should have locked my door, but it was the burglar who actually ruined the day.

This is speculation, of course.

*) The guy who told me this was using it as an example of how software engineering had gone to shit since the days when he still wrote the code for that brand's machines. He'd always test the resiliency of the machines he was writing for by sending them a huge .TIFF file via SysEx to see if they'd lock up.