Installing new Audio Units requires restart in High Sierra

I’ve just checked with QA and we’ve not been getting any reports of anything like this and we have a fair few plugins out there used by a lot of customers! We did see this behaviour way back when Yosemite was first released, we initially added a log out at the end of the installer but eventually we found a little trick that seemed to “fix” the issue. We ran this command in the installer auval -v "" "" "" > /dev/null 2>&1 || true this would seem to force some sort of cache to update (presumably because it would have to scan every plugin to try and find a match?) and the plugin would then scan correctly on the next load of the host. However I’m not convinced this is really fixing the issue anymore because looking at our installers it appears that at some point a regression has occurred and we’re not actually running this script anymore anyway!

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finally updated to high sierra, and low and behold I now have to restart to get newly installed aus to show up. Anthony_Nicholls trick didn’t work.

it happens with component manager and auplugin factory entry points

Could someone who’s experiencing this problem take a demo of one our plugins and let me know how you get on? If you don’t have a PACE iLok dongle, the VoxDoubler doesn’t require one (it uses a machine auth), but you will need a free iLok account (https://www.ilok.com/#!registration)

Register here for a demo https://www.sonnox.com/demos

YUP - had to reboot to get VoxDoubler to show.

please can anyone with contacts at apple try and get them to fix this? i have filled a bug report and emailed someone i know, if we all do that maybe something will happen?

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Thanks so much @olilarkin for confirming that, I will get a message to our contacts at Apple tomorrow.

Can you share the bug number with us? I’ll send it to our contacts at Apple.

We’ve made direct contact so no bug number, I saw @olilarkin had also added a post on the CoreAudio API Mailing List.

Also seems to be the case for AUv3s, which i can finally get to show up in Logic/GB after days of trying

What did we joke about windows back then, that it has to reboot for any little setting. I think I had the signature once “Your mouse has moved, please reboot”…
Seems the signs changed. Oh Apple…

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Ran into this myself + heard the same from some of my users.

Contacted our person at Apple and received this reply: “I’ll escalate your note to engineering, but if you could please write up the issue here: https://bugreport.apple.com and send me the bug number. I’ll cc myself on the bug and bring it to the attention of the right team. Please remember to include instructions so we can reproduce the issue. You’ll be able to upload any required software, or send that to me and I’ll make sure any software required to reproduce the bug will be attached. Thanks.”

So, has anyone already created a bug entry there in the meantime?

Alright, I just took a moment to file a bug report with Apple:
https://bugreport.apple.com/web/?problemID=40585802

I am answering my contact with this number so he can escalate to the engineering team.

I don’t know how the Apple issue tracking system works, but if you can/want to add more info to the issue, feel free to do so.

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@fabian Could you tell me which open-source plugins you tried that exhibit the issue?
And did you also experience this with the JUCE example audio plugins (for example: the AudioPluginDemo)?

Just asking as this might make it easier for the Apple people to reproduce the issue.
(I had it with my own plugin too, but the last release is already from several years ago, and the current one is still in beta so I would like to avoid sending them software that is either not up-to-date or not stable to test with).

@KoenT I’ve sent you a pm.

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I just tried with 10.13.5 and for me it seems to be only partially solved - if at all. I built a new plugin from scratch that wasn’t on the machine before. It was moved by the Juce build scripts to the user Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components folder. AU hosts could not load it until I copied the .component file to the system-wide /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components folder. After that it immediately showed up. So after one attempt it seems system wide is now okay, but the user folder still requires a restart.

I’m curious to hear about other experiences with this potential fix for an annoying issue.

Hmm now I’m seeing the issue again even with the system-wide library location and I needed to restart to make a new plugin show up at all. So whatever was fixed in 10.13.5 has not totally solved this problem.

I’m experiencing this issue pretty consistently too now on the latest High Sierra (10.13.6). Is this supposed to have been fixed as of now?

Is this with your development plug-in?
It seems to be working well now for global plug-ins (installed to /Library) but still broken for user library (~/Library)

My dev plugins get installed to /Library as well. I’ll have to run a few more tests but it seems like everytime I bump the version in the Projucer the new builds require a restart.