Although Pro Tools is supported on the current Apple Silicon M1 computers, there are some limitations, which include a lack of support for the HD Native and HDX cards as well as the Avid Video Engine. Maybe this will be changing soon? Based on a response on social media, Avid now have a target date to resolve this.

Avid announced Apple M1 support at the end of June with the release of Pro Tools 2021.6, with Pro Tools First, Pro Tools and Pro Tools Ultimate software and all included Avid plugins only qualified to run through Rosetta 2. There were some caveats which included HDX and HD Native systems as well as DADman (MTRX and MTRX Studio) and the Video Engine not supported on M1 Macs.

Since the release of 2021.6, DAD has announced that DADman software is now supported on Apple Silicon powered computers, however Avid are yet to announce approval for this latest version of DADman for the Avid MTRX and MTRX Studio interfaces.

Although Avid has posted that they are hard at work clearing up these caveats, there was no indication of timescale until now.

On the Avid Pro Tools Users group on Facebook, Francois Quereuil who is Vice President Audio, Product Management responded to a question from Miasy Raoloson asking…

“Any rumor on when mac M1 will support HD native and HDX?”

Unexpectedly, Francois Quereuil replied saying…

“We’re targeting official support and updated drivers in October.”

Scott Benveniste Gatteño asked this follow up question…

“Francois Quereuil that’s great news! Any word as to whether the Video Engine will be working on Apple Silicon with this update?”

to which Francois replied, saying…

“Scott Benveniste Gatteño that is also the plan, although there may be limitations in available codecs at first.”

Although this isn’t an official announcement, it is a statement of intent from ‘the boss’. It would appear as though we can expect, not only the missing support for the video engine and HDX cards but implied in Francois’ responses, Apple Silicon support too sometime in October 2021.

As discussed in our article Why Your Music Software May Not Be On A Silicon Mac Anytime Soon the rollout of native Apple Silicon support is dependant on PACE for software, which is protected by iLok but Apple Silicon support via Rosetta 2 is an extremely effective stop-gap, which allows the use of Apple Silicon hardware. This announcement suggests that such hardware will be capable of running HDX sooner rather than later, which has to be welcome news.