u-he has announced that its plugins have been updated with native support for Apple Silicon hardware, which massively improves performance on the latest generation of Macintosh computers.

We saw Apple’s switch to their own CPU architecture as a welcome opportunity to up our game and “go native”, so to speak. After several months of hard work, we have new plug-in versions, all refactored to offer a massive performance boost on recent Macs with Apple Silicon CPUs, especially if your host application has also gone M1-native. This means more instances of your favourite u-he plug-ins!

The update also includes improved multi-core support for Intel-based Macs and smoother GUI response on all Mac models. Windows and Linux users also benefit from the following changes:

  • Improved browsers, easy drag & drop soundset installation.
  • New resource management in Hive – most presets will use less CPU.
  • Support for MTS-ESP, a new project-wide microtuning standard.
  • New designs for Triple Cheese (freeware) and ZebraCM (magware).
  • Better overall performance for all plug-ins on all platforms.

The updates are free for existing owners, available to download from the u-he website. New users can purchase u-he’s plugins at the u-he store and from distributor Plugin Boutique.

Note that AAX Mac is temporarily unavailable until native AAX support for Big Sur/Apple Silicon arrives. Users of Pro Tools should continue working with the previous versions until further notice.