Why won’t my Mac Shutdown or Restart after installing Pro Tools?

There are a few things that can prevent a Mac from Restarting and/or Shutting down but if you you are running Mac OS C 10.11 El Capitan and have recently installed Pro Toolsl HD 12.2 (or earlier), you may be dealing with an incompatibility between the OS 10.11 and the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file.

In these cases, the Mac will begin to shutdown normally but hang after all desktop icons and the dock have disappeared. The cursor will still move but there is nothing on the screen to click on. Holding the power button for 2 seconds to manually shut down the Mac.

This is caused by an incompatibility between El Capitan and the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file.

• The Pro Tools | HD 12.3 (or later) driver installer (included with the Pro Tools installer) will automatically remove this file if El Capitan is detected. Therefore, if you update to El Capitan after installing HD Driver 12.3 (or later), you will encounter this issue. However, if you update to El Capitan before installing HD Driver 12.3 (or later), you will not.
• You may also manually delete the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file, located here: MacHD/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/

Note:

Removing the Avid CoreAudio.plugin file will remove CoreAudio functionality with Pro Tools HDX and HD Native hardware (which doesn’t work in most cases anyway on OS X 10.10 and higher as of the 12.3 release). A driver which allows CoreAudio functionality with Pro Tools HD hardware on the newer OS X versions is currently in development. 

 

 

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