Mac Oparating system, Protools and other program compatibility

Not unless you sell yours and buy one that is compatible or upgrade the software or find a substitute software that does work. See App Compatibility Table - RoaringApps. As best as I can tell from what you have described, you have a 2006 or 2007 Mac Pro. They are Woodcrest and Clovertown, respectively.

Neither of those models can run Yosemite. The last compatible OS X version for both is Lion - 10.7.x. I suspect someone modified the machine and/or OS to boot Yosemite.

If it is a 2008 model, then it should be using 800 MHz RAM, not 667 MHz which will cause it to run slower. However, Yosemite will run on that model. But that has nothing to do with your described problem with the Protocols software. What is that software for? Are you sure it is not a Windows program?

Yes, you can. But not further. Sierra and later will not run on that model. But I know nothing about this software you want to run, so I don't know if that will help. Especially, since it should run on the OS X version already installed as you stated.

Upgrading to El Capitan

You can upgrade to El Capitan from Lion or directly from Snow Leopard. El Capitan can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for FREE.

To upgrade to El Capitan you must have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 or Lion installed. Download El Capitan from the App Store. Sign in using your Apple ID. El Capitan is free. The file is quite large, over 5 GBs, so allow some time to download. It would be preferable to use Ethernet because it is nearly four times faster than wireless.

Macs that can be upgraded to OS X El Capitan

1. iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) - Model Identifier 7,1 or later

2. MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) - Model Identifier 5,1 or later

3. MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later

4. MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) - Model Identifier 2,1 or later

5. Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later

6. Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later

7. Xserve (Early 2009) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later

To find the model identifier open System Profiler in the Utilities' folder. It's displayed in the panel on the right.

Are my applications compatible?

See App Compatibility Table - RoaringApps.

Pro Tools 10 and Pro Tools HD 10 only support up to OS X 10.8.5 maximum and that is if you have Pro Tools 10.3.7 to 10.3.10.

If you want compatibility with Yosemite i.e. OS X 10.10 then you need to be using Pro Tools 11.3 or higher.

See - http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Compatibility/Pro-Tools-Operating-Syste m-Compatibility-Chart

With regards to downgrading to in this case Mountain Lion i.e. OS X 10.8.5 you need to download or already have downloaded a copy of the Mountain Lion installer app from the Mac App Store. Since this is a long discontinued version unless you have previously 'purchased' it you will not be able to find it on the Mac App Store. If you have previously purchased it then it will shop up under 'Previous Purchases' in the Mac App Store once you have logged in to the Mac App Store using your account.

Update: It seems you can still purchase Mountain Lion although this requires a slightly different process to normal. Visit this page - http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6377Z/A/os-x-mountain-lion

Once you go through the process of buying Mountain Lion and downloading it, you will probably find that you cannot run that installer from within Yosemite. To get round this you may have to do the following.

1. Download DiskMakerX from here - http://diskmakerx.com you may need to use an older version for making a Mountain Lion installer see version 3.4 here http://diskmakerx.com/whats-this/
2. Use DiskMakerX to make a bootable USB memory stick, this is done by telling DiskMakerX to copy the Mountain Lion installer on to the USB stick in a special way
3. Boot from the USB memory stick
4. Choose either a blank hard disk or erase your existing one (the USB stick will include a copy of Disk Utility which you can use to reformat hard disks with)
5. Now you will be able to use the USB memory stick to install on to that hard disk

shamskabra wrote:

Thanks John for the detail answer of my question, that helps, one more question

It appears that if I am pro tools user and like to jump between versions like 10 to 12 then there is no way of having one Mac OS which works for all. am i right ?

Thanks again.

It looks like OS X 10.8.5 aka Mountain Lion can be used with Pro Tools 10.3.7 to 10.3.10 and also can be used with Pro Tools 12.0 to 12.4. Anything higher than 12.4 would require a newer version of OS X and hence no longer support Pro Tools 10.3.7 to 10.3.10.

You could create a second partition or use a second hard disk and have more than one version of OS X installed and therefore be able to run other versions of Pro Tools.

Based on your description, you have the early 2008 model (aka 3,1) which has two Xeon E5472 (Harpertown/Penryn) processors. So the hardware meets the requirements for Protools.

It looks like your version of Mac OS is too new for your version of Protools. You should try a newer version of Protools since Apple makes it very difficult to revert to an older version of the OS.

Note that if you want to edit video on this system, you will want more RAM.

(Edit: it looks like that was already answered. I didn't see the replies)