ARA Logic Pro compatibility

Audio Plugins
1

I’ve been trying to get a minimal plugin with ARA support and use it with Logic Pro but I’ve failed to do so.

I’m using

  • JUCE (develop – 04d540df6)

  • ARA_SDK releases/2.2.0.

  • MacOS with M2 Pro chipset.

  • Logic Pro 10.7.9

When I run the Demo Ara plugin (found in JUCE/examples/Plugins/ARAPluginDemo.h ) in the JUCE AudioPluginHost it seems to work fine and is fully capable with the ARA host provided. Whilst in Logic Pro it doesn’t seem to be able to recognise Logic Pro as an ARA host.

As I had this problem with the Ara demo provided by JUCE, where I get the message, “ARA host isn’t detected. This plugin only supports ARA mode” I decided to create the minimum possible ARA enabled plugin so I decided to go for the Projucer ARA solution, which is a skeleton Plugin that contains no further logic than the boilerplate code. (All options were left at default in Producer – Plugin → ARA → Xcode (MacOs))

My only addition to that plugin was tests to see whether I can access ARA related objects.

The below paint method renders with all the properties being TRUE in the JUCE AudioPluginHost but all FALSE in Logic Pro.

The plugin is recognised AND sound comes out of the plugin output, the problem is no ARA host is recognised.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I intend to develop an innovative plugin and interplugin communication is a key issue I’m looking to solve

void ProjucerAraAudioProcessorEditor::paint (juce::Graphics& g)
{
    g.fillAll (getLookAndFeel().findColour (juce::ResizableWindow::backgroundColourId));
    g.setColour (juce::Colours::white);
    g.setFont (15.0f);
    juce::String text = "isARAEditorView " + (isARAEditorView() ? "true" : "false") + "\n"+
    "isEditorView " + (audioProcessor.isEditorView() ? "true" : "false") +"\n"+
    "isEditorRenderer " + (audioProcessor.isEditorRenderer() ? "true" : "false") ;
    g.drawFittedText (text, getLocalBounds(), juce::Justification::centred, 1);
}

Best regards,
Nikolaos Pappas

2

I’ve realised that for the time being Logic Pro run on aarch64 (M1 and M2 MacOs chips) is forcing IPC which makes it not compatible with ARA. The solution I came to was to

  1. Run Logic pro using Rosetta
    Go to applications and right click Logic pro to enable to Run with rosetta setting
  2. Create a Project with Projucer for Xcode
    Run Projucer select Plugin → ARA
  3. Open with Xcode and build an Audio Unit targeted for both architectures (as the My mac option only targets aarch64 chips)
    At the top of the Xcode window there is a series of breadcrumbs one of which shows the scheme and the build destination. On that very menu chose - AU and Any Mac (defaults to MyMac)

Then the resulting plugin is compatible with both architectures but it’s ARA enabled in x86_64.

1 Like