Logic Pro 11 kept freezing at the Audio Unit scan on a client’s Mac, and I traced it back to HALO 2 and an expansion pack whose content wouldn’t download.
I was with a client in person, working through several jobs. One was HALO 2, an instrument plugin from DH Plugins that he’d just installed. When he tried to load it as an Audio Unit instrument in Logic it showed greyed out and wouldn’t fully load, and Logic would hang and stop responding until he force quit it. Some of his other plugins were slow to load as well.
Getting Logic to open again
I started with Activity Monitor, to see which process was causing Logic to freeze, but I couldn’t find anything useful in there. Because other plugins were loading slowly too, I wiped the Audio Unit caches in his user Library. After that Logic got stuck at the Audio Unit scan every time it opened. Restarting didn’t help, and neither did turning off Norton’s Auto-Protect. Logic was still picking up references to other plugins, which I thought might explain why it wasn’t loading properly.
It wasn’t only HALO 2 it froze on. Anything installed with UJAM was causing a problem, so I took all the UJAM plugins out of the Components folder. Logic then got as far as HALO 2 and froze there. Next I emptied the Components folder completely. This time Logic opened, but oddly it still showed a small number of plugins, and they weren’t ones that had been in the folder.
So I removed the other places where Logic keeps track of plugins:
- the Logic Pro preferences file (.plist)
- the Audio Unit cache file
- the Audio Unit validation tool’s file in the caches
With those gone, Logic opened with an empty plugin list.
Narrowing it down to HALO 2
I put HALO 2 back on its own. It was the only plugin there and Logic still failed to load it, so I knew it was this particular install of HALO 2 causing the trouble. I reinstalled it, and then it loaded.
He had also bought some expansion packs from DH Plugins, and Beast Mode was one of them. I ran the Beast Mode installer from its DMG. The expansion installed and licensed, but its content wouldn’t download. It asked for a download location, so I created a folder called HALO 2 Content in the Users > Shared folder. Every time I started the download I got the message “Download aborted, try again”. I tried a few more times with different folders, and checked whether the location or write permissions were the issue, but the message stayed the same. When I opened Logic again, HALO 2 had stopped loading.
In the expansion’s DMG, installing the expansion and downloading its content are two separate actions, so the expansion can be installed and licensed with no content behind it.
Uninstalling Beast Mode got HALO 2 working again. My reading is that a half-installed expansion like this can corrupt your HALO 2, leave it greyed out in Logic, and possibly stop Logic loading altogether.
Where it stands
This was one job in an on-site visit and we had other things to get to, so once Logic was working I suggested we tackle the download in another session. I’m marking it as unsolved, because we diagnosed the problem but haven’t cured it yet. My instinct is that it’s one of two things. Either something on his side is blocking the download, possibly his antivirus, or there’s a problem at DH Plugins’ end with their server not allowing it. I’ll look at it next time I see him.
He was happy. His Logic system was back, no longer crashing or freezing, and he could carry on working on his songs, even though the new expansion wasn’t available yet.
If HALO 2 goes grey in Logic after you add an expansion, check that the expansion’s content actually downloaded, because the licence and the content are installed separately.
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