For the past several years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to update my Macs to the latest OS releases and not have any core apps in my workflows break. Granted, my workflows aren't the most complicated by any means. I usually don't update to major releases on day one, but I tend to update within a few weeks of them coming out and have been just fine.

That is, until this week, when I was reminded of the risk I take every time I click the Update button: sometimes software changes, stuff doesn't work together and then it breaks.

After updating from macOS Sonoma 14.0 to 14.3 I noticed my music practice tool of choice, Anytune, started having massive performance issues. Audio playback was fine, but the scrolling waveforms were very choppy and input was unresponsive.

I first thought it was a one-off issue or perhaps because my song had several markers (perhaps the most I've ever had in one track), but restarting the app several times, and even reinstalling the app did not help.

Looking at the App Store page for the app, the developers said they are aware of this issue in 14.3 and are working on a fix. But in the meantime, I'm left with a music slow-down application that's really hard to use, if not unusable if you're interacting with the app or looking at the waveforms. It's bad enough that I started looking at alternative apps, although there aren't many great ones. (Anytune wins in the design department compared to its competitors. For now, I'm using Capo, but that's a story for another day.)

In the end, it's not the fault of the Anytune developers or Apple. Instead, it's a reminder for me to be appreciative of software that works and is reliable, and to sometimes remember that instead of always pushing for the latest and greatest.