Music notation software and macOS 27 Golden Gate

Autumn arrives, and with it the annual ritual of the apples — and Apples — falling from the sky. With a recent cadence almost as sure as the law of gravitation itself, macOS Golden Gate will be released today. This is macOS 27, and it’s the first version of macOS that will not run on an Intel-based Mac at all.

We flagged that a year ago, when macOS Tahoe arrived and Apple confirmed it would be the last stop for Intel hardware. And since we have a conference to think about in San Francisco next year, it’s good to see that Apple has finally named an operating system after a landmark some of us will be looking at in person next summer.

As ever, most people care less about the landmark than about three things: whether the OS will run on their computer, whether their software will run on the OS, and what they get out of it if the answer to the first two is yes.

Time to take a bite — or a byte — of fall’s fruit? Let’s address those juicy details here, in that order.

Compatibility

Golden Gate requires Apple silicon. There’s no Intel version, no Intel installer, and no supported path forward for an Intel Mac beyond Tahoe. If you’re running a 2019 Mac Pro or a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro that you have been nursing along, Tahoe is where it stays.

Here is the list of Golden Gate-supported Macs:

• MacBook Neo: 2026
• MacBook Air with Apple silicon: 2020 and later
• MacBook Pro with Apple silicon: 2020 and later
• iMac with Apple silicon: 2021 and later
• Mac mini with Apple silicon: 2020 and later
• Mac Studio: 2022 and later
• Mac Pro with Apple silicon: 2023

In other words, every Apple silicon Mac ever sold can run Golden Gate, and nothing else can. It’s the shortest this section has been since Apple silicon showed up with Big Sur in November 2020. (For nostalgia’s sake, I’ve been writing some version of this post every autumn since the days of Mavericks — the comments on that post ran much longer than the article itself!)

Rosetta’s last stand

Rosetta 2 is the translation layer that has been quietly running Intel code on Apple silicon since 2020. At WWDC in 2025, Apple said it would keep Rosetta available as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps through macOS 27, and then reduce it to a subset aimed at older unmaintained games. On September 1 of this year, Apple restated the timetable in a note to developers: macOS 27 is the final release to support Rosetta for Intel-only applications.

So Golden Gate still runs Intel-only software. It’s also the last macOS that will.

The current releases of the principal notation applications are already native to Apple silicon. Sibelius has been a universal binary since the 2024.6 update, MuseScore Studio since 4.4, and Dorico for years before that. Fender Notion is native as well. Even Finale was universal beginning with v27.2, well before MakeMusic stopped development. The conspicuous exception is the old — and soon to be unsupported — Notion 6 desktop application, which still requires Rosetta.

The applications are only part of the compatibility check. Apple’s macOS 27 release notes warn that Intel-based plug-ins and loaders may neither appear in Settings nor trigger an incompatibility notification. Apart from the exception Apple is making for certain legacy games, Intel software will stop working in macOS 28.

Apple names several folders to inspect, among them:

• ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/
• ~/Library/Printers/
• ~/Library/ColorPickers/

As the file paths indicate, these are audio plug-ins, printer drivers, print dialog extensions — the components that are easiest to overlook when the applications themselves are already native.

An Intel-only component may simply disappear once Rosetta is gone. In a scoring setup, that could first show up as a missing plug-in or a printer option that is no longer available. Sibelius added VST3 support in 2026.5, which supports more current plug-ins, but plug-in format and processor architecture are separate questions: a VST3 plug-in can still contain Intel-only code.

Golden Gate does give you two places to look. System Settings > About > macOS has a new Intel-based Apps tab listing applications that won’t run in macOS 28, and an Intel application also carries a notice in its Get Info panel. Both have limits, though. Reporting from the beta says the Settings list covers applications launched within the past year, so anything you haven’t opened lately may not be there — and neither place accounts for plug-ins, which is the category Apple’s own release note says may go unlisted.

Two other Rosetta details will affect what happens when you upgrade. If you had Rosetta installed under Tahoe, it isn’t automatically restored when you move to macOS 27; macOS installs it again on demand. Any application you had previously checked Open using Rosetta for will now launch natively instead, and Apple advises re-assessing whether it still needs Rosetta.

Golden Gate therefore gives you one more year to identify and replace the Intel code that remains in your setup, while you still have a working system against which to test it.

Other things quietly going away

The following technical items won’t affect most users, but if you have a sophisticated (or old) backup system, take note.

Time Machine will no longer back up over AFP, the Apple Filing Protocol, in macOS 27. That rules out an AirPort Time Capsule as a Time Machine destination and affects older network-attached storage that relies on AFP for Time Machine. Apple recommends a network-attached storage device (NAS) that supports Time Machine over Server Message Block (SMB).

AirPort Utility, meanwhile, is no longer included in a clean installation of macOS; it remains after an upgrade if it was already installed, although Apple doesn’t guarantee that it will work. For what it’s worth, Apple discontinued its AirPort routers way back in 2018, but has continued to support them through the AirPort Utility app until now, so eight years is a good run.

Apple has also deprecated encrypted HFS+ (CoreStorage) volumes and advises anyone backing up to an encrypted HFS+ external drive to move to an encrypted APFS-formatted one. Between that and the AFP change, and any other alphabet soup you ingest on the path to Golden Gate, the practical advice is the same as it has been on the podcast episode we point everyone to every September: check that your backup actually works before you upgrade, not after.

What’s new

There are plenty of places to read a full account of Golden Gate’s features, starting with Apple’s own site, but we’ll call out a few highlights of interest.

Apple’s headline feature is Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant that can draw on personal context from messages, email, photos, and other apps; answer questions about what is on screen; and take actions across apps. A dedicated Siri app will keep conversation history, Siri will be available through Spotlight and context menus, and Visual Intelligence on the Mac will have its own keyboard shortcut.

Apple says “Siri AI is rolling out in English”. Perhaps you could ask Siri what Apple means by that statement?

The design news is mostly a walking-back. Liquid Glass, introduced in Tahoe, now has a slider ranging from ultraclear to fully tinted. Apple has also restored more uniform toolbars, edge-to-edge sidebars, and colored sidebar icons. By default, menus lose most of the symbols that appeared beside commands in macOS 26. Anyone who found last year’s menus busy will be pleased.

Apple also promises better Spotlight suggestions, quicker AirDrop transfers, and faster browsing of network files such as those that might be on a Windows machine. The current beta release notes include a fix for an AudioDSP crash when audio device properties change, but do not identify a major Core Audio, Core MIDI, or system-font change that should alter everyday notation workflows.

One new macOS 27 behavior may look more alarming than it is. As Apple explains, if an application leaves a helper or other process running after you quit it, macOS may mark the application as Running in Background in the Dock, and will notify you the first time it happens, with related controls in System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions. Music applications often rely on such processes for licensing, media databases, synchronization, and other shared services, so their presence isn’t necessarily cause for concern. Before stopping one, find out what it does: disabling a required helper may cause errors or instability in the application that depends on it.

As someone who lives in email, I’m particularly enthused about one lesser-heralded feature: Apple says that Mail gains a new ranking system which “brings the most relevant results to the top to help you find what you need right away — even if it’s buried deep in your inbox.” I’m into my fourth decade of using email, and have yet to discover a truly satisfactory search workflow. Here’s hoping.

Some Apple Intelligence features run on Apple’s servers rather than on the Mac. Apple says those features have daily usage limits, with increased access included in most iCloud+ plans; image generation is the example it gives.

Everything is tuned for AI now

The machines are being built for this, too. Apple announced a new Mac mini and a new Mac Studio on August 25, both shipping September 22 with Golden Gate preinstalled. The Mac mini gets the M6 — Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip, with a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine — or an M5 Pro. The Mac Studio gets the M5 Max, with an 18-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU, or the M5 Ultra, with up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and up to 512 GB of unified memory at 1.2 TB/s.

Read Apple’s copy for either machine and the comparisons are mostly about AI: prompt processing, model loading, and inference. The new M6 and M5-family chips put what Apple calls a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core. Golden Gate also introduces Core AI, a framework for running models on Apple silicon. It joins Core ML rather than replacing it; Apple continues to list and support both.

To bring it closer to home, a full orchestral score doesn’t care how many tokens per second a Mac can push. Vocal synthesis in Cantai, audio-to-score transcription, optical music recognition, and score following can all benefit from faster local AI processing, though. David and I spent a whole podcast episode on the distance between what people expect these tools to do and what they actually do, up to and including the newly coined “Gould test”. Golden Gate supplies developers with more capacity to run models locally; what notation applications do with it remains to be seen.

The Siri AI service runs on Macs with M1 or later, as well as the A18 Pro-based MacBook Neo. Apple’s most powerful on-device model, which enables more expressive Siri voices and more advanced dictation, requires a Mac with M3 or later and at least 12 GB of unified memory. The net result is that Golden Gate compatibility and access to every Siri AI feature aren’t synonymous.

New hardware, and a cheap MacBook

The Mac mini starts at $899 with the M6 and $1,699 with the M5 Pro; the Mac Studio starts at $2,499 with the M5 Max and $5,499 with the M5 Ultra. The mini launched at $599 with the M4 in 2024, and the price has now been raised twice. The M6 mini is a much faster machine than the M4 was, and it’s also $300 more than the entry price we had previously been accustomed to quoting — a sign of the times, with computer prices up across the board.

The cheap one is the MacBook Neo, which Apple introduced in March. Its base model is now $699, although education customers can get $100 off that price. It’s the first Mac to use an iPhone-class A-series chip, the A18 Pro, instead of an M-series part. It has 8 GB of unified memory that can’t be configured upward, a 13-inch sRGB display, no Thunderbolt, one USB 3 port, and one much slower USB 2 port. It runs Golden Gate.

On paper, it’s tempting as a second machine, especially for the road — and yes, you can take it to rehearsal and even drive a second display off of it. It’s suitable for general scoring software use, but a large scoring template open alongside a sample library and a PDF viewer may test the limits of the Neo’s internals, so consider the specs carefully before making even the relatively modest investment in what is now the lowest-priced MacBook.

The other OSs, and a new device

As usual, the Mac isn’t upgrading alone. iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 arrive in the same season, with many of the same design and Apple Intelligence changes. Not every feature comes to every platform, and the timing of Siri AI is separate from the operating-system releases.

Apple also just introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, available beginning October 23. It will run iOS 27 (27.1, specifically), not iPadOS 27, so the current iPad-only version of Dorico won’t run on it, but apps that already run on iOS will, like Sibelius and Fender Notion. Its 7.6-inch inner display can run two apps side by side and will support the USB-C Apple Pencil later this year, so it may prove useful for viewing and marking up PDF scores, while giving notation developers a new format to consider.

For readers working on the now-quotidian iPad, the practical items are mostly speed and handling. Apple says browsing and transferring files between an iPad and an external drive is up to five times faster, and that AirDrop transfers are up to 80 percent faster. iPhone-only apps can now be resized on the iPad, although that change may expose layouts that weren’t built with resizing in mind. AirPods users also get a Custom EQ control for adjusting lows, mids, and highs.

iPadOS 27 runs on the iPad Pro (11-inch, 2nd generation and later; 12.9-inch, 4th generation and later; and M4 models or later), the iPad Air (4th generation and later, including 11-inch and 13-inch M-series models), the iPad (9th generation and later, including the A16 model), and the iPad mini (6th generation and later, including the A17 Pro model).

In version 26, the iPad’s new windowing system was the item that required attention from notation developers, and both Avid and Steinberg addressed it in the weeks after release. We’ll update the sections below once we have statements about the iPad versions of Sibelius and Dorico on iPadOS 27.

Proceed with caution

Apple’s pro apps like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro can be expected to be Golden Gate-ready from day one. But if you have third-party plug-ins and sound libraries that you use in these or indeed any of your music notation software, you’ll want to check that every one of them is supported as well. This year the check extends to drivers, installers, and the other Intel components Apple now lists in System Settings.

The main notation applications have already made the transition to Apple silicon, with the exception of legacy Notion 6. That doesn’t amount to official Golden Gate support: wait until the developer of your application of choice has qualified it, and consult our Scoring Notes Product Guide to make sure that you’re staying current.

As always, caution is advised, especially if you use other applications, virtual instruments, plug-ins, or hardware in conjunction with your music notation software. Unless you really need to be on the bleeding edge — and suffer the corresponding cuts and bruises to your workflow — it’s best to wait to move to Golden Gate until your favorite applications are officially supported and time-tested.

To that end, the fine folks at Sweetwater maintain a comprehensive compatibility guide for many pro audio and music products. So, in addition to your favorite site, which is surely Scoring Notes, do bookmark the Sweetwater macOS Golden Gate compatibility guide for a running tally of information about a huge number of software applications and hardware, as well as links to the relevant first-party sites.

And, as ever, on the Scoring Notes podcast, we have a few time-tested tips and strategies to follow when it comes time to click that big button, whether it’s the one that says upgrade your operating system or the one that debits your bank account and results in a brand-new computer, and the steps you should take to ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.

If you’re using any of these products with Golden Gate, you are very welcome to share your experience in the comments section — and if you go digging in your plug-ins folder and find something ancient, we would like to hear about that too.

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Updated October 6, 2026 with information about the installers for the Garritan libraries and ARIA Player, and with updated information about Dorico.
Updated September 29, 2026 with Sibelius 2026.9 support on macOS 27, a link to the Steinberg page about explicit background app transparency, and a link to the Fender compatibility page.
Updated September 22, 2026 with a link to the official Steinberg compatibility page for their products on macOS Golden Gate.
Updated September 14, 2026: Initial post.

Note: The official Golden Gate status will not say “Supported” unless the developer has fully and officially qualified its software to run on that version of macOS.

We’ll continue to update this post as warranted.

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Sibelius

Official Golden Gate status: Supported

Official Apple silicon status: Supported (Universal)

Upon the release of Sibelius 2026.9 on September 29, 2026, Avid said, “The team has tested the latest operating systems from Apple across all of our applications, and we’re happy to share that we’ve qualified Sibelius to run properly on the macOS 27, iOS 27, and iPadOS 27.”

Avid maintains a macOS Golden Gate support article covering its software, including Sibelius, along with Media Composer, Pro Tools, EUCON, NEXIS, and DADman. Watch that page for qualified version numbers after Golden Gate is released.

Three other Avid references are worth keeping handy:

• The operating system compatibility chart for all versions of Sibelius, which goes back to 1.4.
• The comprehensive chart of Avid product compatibility with recent macOS versions and chipsets, as well as iOS and iPadOS.
• The minimum requirements for Sibelius.

Sibelius became a universal binary, allowing it to run natively on Apple silicon, with the 2024.6 update in June 2024.

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Dorico

Official Golden Gate status: Supported

Official Apple silicon status: Supported (Universal)

On September 29, 2026, Steinberg released Dorico 6.2.31. On the Dorico forum, Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury said:

“We have today released a hot fix for Dorico 6, bringing it to version 6.2.31. This is a very small update intended for macOS 27 Golden Gate users only. It is identical to version 6.2.30, except that it includes a fix in the audio engine for the problem experienced by some users whereby notes played on their MIDI keyboard would hold forever.

The problem is related to changes in the Core MIDI technology in macOS 27, and we have reported the problem to Apple; they will presumably provide a fix in due course. In the meantime, Dorico 6.2.31 works around the problem.

This update is recommended for all Mac users running macOS 27 Golden Gate. It is not required for users of earlier versions of macOS, and there is no corresponding Windows update.

To get the update, simply run Steinberg Download Assistant, and find the Dorico 6.2.31 application installer available for download there.”

Although Steinberg doesn’t officially list Dorico as supported on macOS 27 Golden Gate yet, the presence of this update suggests de facto macOS 27 Golden Gate compatibility, and so we have listed Dorico as “Supported”.

As for the rest of Steinberg’s products, the official word as of September 22, 2026 is to wait: “If you rely on your Steinberg software and hardware to run smoothly, we recommend that you refrain from updating to macOS Golden Gate for now,” says the advice on this page, which will be updated with a compatibility list for relevant Steinberg products.

Steinberg also has its own version of the advice stated earlier in this article regarding explicit background app transparency.

For complete information about Dorico and all of Steinberg’s products, consult the official Steinberg help center. Steinberg normally publishes an article for each major macOS release. The system requirements for Steinberg products are available separately.

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MuseScore Studio

Official Golden Gate status: Not yet supported

Official Apple silicon status: Supported (Universal)

Muse Group has informed Scoring Notes that they are testing MuseScore Studio with macOS 27 presently, and they will provide us with more official information once available.

MuseScore Studio became a universal binary, allowing it to run natively on Apple silicon, with the 4.4 update in August 2024.

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Fender Notion and Notion 6

Official Golden Gate status: Supported

Official Apple silicon status: Fender Notion — supported natively; Notion 6 — requires Rosetta 2

Fender published a macOS 27 – Golden Gate / iOS 27 / iPadOS 27 compatibility page on September 28.

Fender’s senior product manager, Chris Swaffer, told Scoring Notes on September 14:

“Fender Notion 3.7.1 is currently working as expected on macOS 27 and iOS/iPadOS 27. PreSonus’ legacy Notion 6 Desktop 6.8.2 (via Rosetta) is working as expected on macOS 27, but note, this is likely the last macOS to run this version. Official support ceases for PreSonus Notion 6 on January 13, 2027.”

Fender Notion, formerly Notion Mobile, is the current cross-platform app. PreSonus’s technical specifications say that it runs natively on Apple silicon and requires macOS 13.5 or later. Version 3.7.1 was released in August 2026.

The older Notion 6 desktop application was supported under Rosetta 2 on Tahoe. PreSonus stopped selling it on January 13, 2026, although support for existing users and Fender Studio Pro+ members continues through January 13, 2027. Golden Gate is the last macOS release on which an Intel-only application such as Notion 6 can run at all. The last version of Notion 6 is version 6.8.2.

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Finale

Official Golden Gate status: Not supported

Official Apple silicon status: Supported (Universal) at the time the product was discontinued; support no longer available

On August 26, 2024, MakeMusic announced that it would cease development of Finale. Official support ended on August 25, 2025, and no version of Finale is officially supported on any operating system. The Dorico crossgrade offer closed on July 23, 2026, removing the last commercial thread connecting the two.

Finale v27.4.1 is a universal binary, so Rosetta isn’t the obstacle to running it on Golden Gate. We’ve heard anecdotal reports that Finale v27 on Golden Gate is actually an improvement over Tahoe, in part thanks to some of the aforementioned UI rollbacks Apple made. Still, this underscores the unpredictability of using Finale from year to year. If you’re keeping a Finale machine alive, let us know what works and what doesn’t.

However, if you use one of the Garritan Instruments libraries or the Garritan Aria Player, there is an issue preventing installers for those products from completing their installation on computers running macOS 27 Golden Gate. The installer may either display a message that you need an Intel processor to install the packages, or simply that the ARIA Player cannot be installed on your computer. MakeMusic says that the error message is inaccurate: “The Garritan installers are able to be installed on M-series Macs on previous operating systems. You do not need an Intel processor, as the error message suggests.” Further, the issue only affects the installers; if you upgraded to Golden Gate, previously installed Garritan libraries will continue to function normally. MakeMusic is aware of this issue and is actively working on a fix. Follow their dedicated Knowledge Base page for this issue to be notified via email of an update (notfication requires a MakeMusic account).

For more on using Finale as an unsupported application, and on getting your files out of it:

• Finale’s twilight zone: Ensuring a smooth ride into the sunset
• Using Finale in the unsupported era
• Leaving Finale behind
• Denigma Online solves the riddle of opening Finale files without Finale

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For the latest information about compatibility for Sibelius, Dorico, and MuseScore Studio, as well as links to the latest news and reviews about product releases, please see the Scoring Notes Product Guide.