Hi everybody. I’m mew to the VCV world. I’m about to switch to a new Macbook pro with M2 processors and i wonder if i’m about to encounter any issues using VCV rack. Are all the modules compatible? Will i be able to use it flawlessly in all its functions?
Thank you
I am using m1 pro and rack is very stable. regarding modules, plenty, over 1000 are compatible, there are enough to do almost anything possible. There some cool collections that haven’t been ported to ARM yet or possibly ever but in general you should be fine. Once you install when you go to the library you will see what is and isn’t compatible when browsing. See screenshot to see what I mean.
Thanks for the answer. Do you know if non compatible modules can run on rosetta2 or are just unusable for now?
All modules run just fine on Rosetta, and performance is still excellent. I have not experienced any significant difference between running on Rosetta vs native M2 ARM except for one exceptionally large patch of mine that is too much for Rosetta.
Most modules are available for ARM. The ones that are not will be labeled as such in the web library as long as you are browsing with your Mac.
No, generally you should have a great experience. Be mindful though, if you’ll be using Rack Pro as VST in a DAW, you need to match the architecture (ARM64, X64) of Rack and the Daw correctly. Not all combinations are valid. You need to read the documentation of your DAW. Rack will run just fine with either architecture (X64 under Rosetta2). You can even install both architectures of Rack on the same computer, by renaming and installing in the right order.
No. I maintain a list of the (currently 27) Rack plugins that are not yet ready for ARM here. Only really two “big ones” and they should be coming to ARM. But like I said above if you really need it you can run the X64 version on the computer as well. It shouldn’t be an issue for you, unless you want to run other people’s patches, where they have used one or more of those plugins.
Yup. Enjoy your beautiful machine.
I think I’d like to try to use the native arm version, but dont want to uninstall the Intel version I have working fully.
What would be the right order?
Now the Pro plugins should be ARM and have overwritten the Intel versions. Mind you, I haven’t tried this myself. Also, I don’t know if it’s actually possible to also rename the Intel plugin files first, and then install the ARM version, to possibly have both the Intel and ARM versions of the (DAW) plugins installed and usable, but it would be an interesting experiment. I somewhat doubt it but who knows…
Thanks 
I think I need to back up everything before doing this. And also need to get my own modules compiled for ARM.
You shouldn’t have to change anything. Most “just work”.
So basically I just need to compile them for arm and that’s it?
When I am building via make install, I do “arch -x86_64 zsh” in terminal. So if I just don’t do this command, it’s build for ARM, right?
Oh, building locally for arm and Mac intel, I don’t know. If you use the rack tool chain you can make builds for all 4 platforms at once. That’s what I do for stuff I send to ppl.
that is correct. by default it will build the arm version, unless you first start a shell in x64 mode, then you get the intel build.
