hey guys it's lance at mac sound solutions and today i'm going on a little adventure
i've installed big sur and pro tools 2021 on my mac pro 5.1 which is running open core
but i installed it on a separate ssd i did not install it over my current working system drive
which is catalina with open core and pro tools 2019. you know when apple comes out
with a big new release it always takes avid a long time to catch up and get a compatible
version of pro tools running with it which they've finally done but there's always quirks there's
always plug-ins that aren't going to work so it's a gradual thing you can't just leap in
and expect it all to be working from day one so i'm doing a test drive i'll slowly install
all my plug-ins and once it all seems to be great then i'll probably make the switch
so you know after trying it out for a week everything seemed pretty good a few of my waves
plug-ins weren't available but that's because the installation was on my other system drive so
yesterday i installed big sur onto the catalina drive it's up and running now um i did have to
jump through a couple of hoops and i'm just going to show you the install process and uh what i went
through um but overall everything seems good so if you want to watch the install you can hang out and
if you don't see you later please subscribe to my channel hit the thumbs up or the thumbs down
and let's get to the install so just a couple of notes before we go forward always make a bootable
clone of your system before installing a new version of mac os i use carbon copy cloner to do
this it's extremely reliable so if something goes wrong you can revert back to your older system
number two if you want to run big sur you must first install martinlow's easy to install open
core package that was specifically made for mac pro five ones it is only for mac pro
five ones and you must be coming from mojave or catalina if you have catalina running chances are
you already installed open core because mojave is the last supported os by apple with the mac
pro five one of course you do this at your own risk but it is easy and it works great i have
left links in the description to martin lowe's youtube channel he has how-to videos on there
and a link to his mac rumors page where you can download his latest version of the open core
package for the five one okay so thanks to open core you can just use the typical software update
in the system preferences and hit update now which is going to download the big sur installer and
we're going to fast forward through that and once we get done with that we're going to hit upgrade
now and then this window opens up then you agree to apple's lengthy terms and then we hit continue
type in your administrative password and hit ok
ok so i sped this part way up because it did take about 16 minutes
and uh and then the computer reboots so with my setup i have three monitors and the boot picker
for open core only shows up on one monitor and that is my monitor connected via display port
my other two monitors are connected via hdmi so you can see the boot picker here
and what's interesting after the first round of install the computer rebooted and it selected
the installer again and it's doing further installations i would have thought that it
was a one-shot deal and would have booted up off the system drive but no it had to
do a second reboot off the installer which it automatically picked i did not have to pick it
so this was like another 10-15 minute process and then it rebooted yet again
and third time's a charm it booted into the system drive and big sur appears goodbye catalina
now it also took a little time before it got to this accessibility screen so it was still
doing stuff probably cleaning out some of the old cobwebs in my old system
and then you just go through and follow the usual stuff here and set up your computer just a little
side note is you know avid will state that you should really install pro tools on a clean
mac os drive meaning you formatted it you installed the new operating system from scratch
like it's going on to a computer that's never been used before and then install pro tools i
can't do that my mac pros from 2009 i've got way too much time invested in customizations
in software authorizations all that stuff and there's no way i'm gonna do it from scratch and
reinstall all my software it just takes way too long i would spend a week doing it and i probably
wouldn't get it back to the way i had my system so i install over the os once i test out the os and
that's why you need to clone your operating system so that you can revert back if there's a problem
but um clean install i know it's the right way to go there's no way i am going to do that so i don't
roll that way i'm not recommending you do what i do which is to install it over the old system
but i've been doing that for years and it really honestly hasn't been a problem
so big sur and pro tools is now installed so let's give pro tools a test run pro tools does
not find my ilock which is plugged into my usb 3 hub which is plugged into my usb 3 pcie card and
i notice that also one of my hard drives wasn't showing up that was also plugged into the same hub
so i went through this the first time i installed big sur i had issues with my
usb 3 card and the way i fixed this was to do a smc reset so i shut down the mac pro
and unplugged the power from the back of the computer for about 10 minutes then i came back
then i held down the power button for about 15 seconds and then plugged it back in and rebooted
then one of my drives came to life but the ilock was still being stubborn uh when it was connected
to usb hub it would not show up so i plugged it into the usb 2 port directly into the mac pro
launched pro tools everything was fine it was seeing the eye lock i then quit pro tools moved
the ilock back to the usb 3 hub and bingo it now worked why this went on i'm not really sure but
if you have the same problem just unplug the device from your hub plug it into one of the
main ports and uh and then put it back and that seemed to do the trick so i'm not really sure the
smc reset did anything although maybe it helped that one hard drive i had to do the same thing
that i did with the ilock with another one of my hard drives it just would not show up when it
was plugged into the usb 3 card so i plugged it into the usb 2 port on the mac pro it showed up
then i moved it back bingo there it was so i just went through and checked a bunch of my plugins
and ran sort of a stress test on the system tried some low buffer settings like down to 32
and uh pro tools seemed to be working really well opened up one of my mixes had no issues so far
of course it's only been a day that i've had it installed so we'll see how it goes i can always
revert to my backup if i have to but i think i'm probably good okay so it's been a few days now
and i gotta say big sur is very perky it feels really smooth on my mac pro 5.1 with rx 5700 xt
i know that some people with the 7 1 mac pros had issues with non-apple
rx 5700 xts they had driver issues but i've had absolutely none
and you know of course we're up to big sur 11.2.3 um it's known that the 11.3
beta is not working with the mac pro 5.1 so keep that in mind i never jump into betas anyway um
you do that on a separate drive if you're going to do it to make sure things work as usual
you don't do it over your main system drive so big sur 11.2.3 as of now is the last potential update
for mac pro five ones with open core without open core you're stuck in mojave but with open core you
can get up to 11.2.3 uh it's known that the 11.3 beta does not work with the mac pro 5 1 as of now
but the genius of martin lowe and the guys at open core might be able to fix that only time will tell
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next time i upload a video and we'll see you on the next max sound solutions video