LYRX for macOS Catalina | Open Call for Beta Testing
A Beta version of LYRX, our top karaoke program, designed for macOS Catalina is now available. This is an open call for beta testing!
Catalina brought major changes to the macOS graphics API, moving from the OpenGL to Metal. OpenGL was designed to be a cross-platform framework, thus support for both the Windows and MAC release of LYRX. While the cross-platform support of OpenGL was solid, Apple realized it was missing the signature integration of the macOS operating system and Apple hardware. Thus, Apple designed the new Metal API specifically for Apple hardware, which can provide up to 10✕ the number of draw calls for LYRX and other PCDJ software.
The change to Metal is beneficial for LYRX’s development moving forward, but the move from OpenGL to Metal required nearly a 40% re-write of our graphics engine, a major component of LYRX. Therefore, the LYRX beta for Catalina requires extensive testing before the public release. We’ve made immense progress over the last 4+ months and the result has been a stable in-house testing version.
(UPDATE: A previous version of this article mentioned that Shaders will not be supported in macOS Catalina for the time being — this is no longer the case. The new release candidate of LYRX supports Shaders!)
For now, we are asking for a few LYRX customers that are using newer Apple computers running macOS Catalina to test the new beta. If you’re interested in testing please fill out the form below. We appreciate your time and support!
Important Notes: 10.14 or 10.15 of macOS is needed to run the Catalina-specific LYRX beta. As noted, this is a beta version, and should not be used in a venue/production environment. Specifically, the GUI/interface and video/karaoke should be tested as the changes there are massive.
