Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Surround Sound Apple Compressor 4 i broken. :(

posted this note on and tagged it with Narrating my work Surround sound

One of the sad collateral damages to updating to macOS High Sierra was my beloved1 Apple Compressor 3. Today I bought and installed Compressor 4 instead. I did that for the same reason that I years ago started using Compressor 3; to batch encode surround sound mixes from PCM (wave, most of the time) to Dolby Digital (AC3).

In Compressor 4, this no longer work.

It’s not that it is a deprecated feature, it is that the feature is broken. If I use AIFF files, it does work, if I use WAVE it doesn’t.

I’ve dug around a bit and it seems to be either a problem with Compressor 4.4.1, and it wasn’t a problem in 4.4.0, or it is a problem with High Sierra. The error message says

I’m not a developer but to me that seems like an SDK problem, so maybe it is High Sierra (in my case 10.13.5) that is the problem.

The silver lining is that there is an update to 10.13.6 available, so I guess I’ll do that update and hope for the best. See you on the other side.


  1. Well, maybe not beloved. It actually drove me crazy most of the time but it did get the job done. 

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