Intel Mac support
MAGDA runs on Intel Macs, but with one limitation, and the support is winding down. Here is the full picture so you can decide whether it works for you.
What works on Intel
Everything in the DAW works on Intel Macs except AI sample search (the “search by sound” feature). You can still index your folders into the media library and filter by family, key, tempo, and tags. Only the part that ranks samples from a plain-language description is missing.
Why AI sample search is missing
Search by sound runs a pair of CLAP audio and text encoders through ONNX Runtime. As of ONNX Runtime 1.26, Microsoft stopped shipping prebuilt macOS x86_64 binaries. Only Apple Silicon (arm64) builds are published. With no runtime to load the model on Intel, MAGDA’s Intel builds ship with that backend disabled. The rest of the media library does not depend on it, so indexing and filtering are unaffected.
Why Intel support is winding down
GitHub, where MAGDA’s release builds run, is retiring Intel macOS from its hosted runners. The macOS 13 image was removed in December 2025, and the last Intel image, macos-15-intel, is only available until August 2027. After that there is no supported way to build an Intel macOS app on GitHub at all.
A new major version has to last its whole release lifecycle. Starting v1 on an Intel target that loses its build pipeline partway through does not make sense. So v0 is likely the last series to support Intel Macs. Intel users can keep using v0 builds for as long as they are useful. v1 onward will be Apple Silicon only.