🎛️ How I Installed My Apogee Symphony I/O MKI Without Using Rosetta on My Apple Silicon Mac

I recently set up a fresh Apple Silicon MacBook Pro and decided to take a stricter approach this time around: no Rosetta 2. That meant avoiding anything that requires Intel emulation.

One particular roadblock? My Apogee Symphony I/O MKI which has been sunset by Apogee. While the last software installer technically supports Apple Silicon, the official installer still requires Rosetta to run. And since there’s no way to uninstall Rosetta once it’s on your system, I didn’t want to install it just for the sake of running a legacy .pkg file.

So… I didn’t.

🛠️ What I Did Instead

I used Suspicious Package — a fantastic little tool that lets you inspect and extract files from .pkg installers — to manually extract the application files, plug-ins, daemons, and kernel extensions from the Apogee installer DMG.

Even better, Suspicious Package let me inspect the installer’s postflight script, which revealed exactly what the official installer does — like creating the .plist file that registers the Symphony system and I/O components. This gave me confidence that I could fully replicate the install process with a shell script.

From there, I wrote:

• An installer script that mimics the official installer (minus Rosetta)
• An optional uninstaller that removes all files and settings cleanly

The process involves a few extra steps, like manually placing extracted files and enabling “Reduced Security” mode to allow the legacy drivers, but it works great — and it avoids installing anything unnecessary.

🔍 For Anyone Else Running Into This…

If you’re a fellow Symphony MKI user on an Apple Silicon Mac and want to avoid Rosetta too, I documented everything and shared the scripts here:

👉 GitHub Repo: symphony-mki-installer-sans-rosetta

The repo includes:

• A step-by-step guide
• Download links for the official installer
• Screenshots of what to expect
• Detailed instructions for using Suspicious Package to extract only what you need

⚠️ Important Note: This project does not redistribute Apogee software — just scripts and instructions. You’ll need to download the official installer yourself and extract files locally.

🙌 Credit Where It’s Due

Big thanks to the developer of Suspicious Package — it’s one of those tools you don’t realize you need until you really need it. It made this process possible. And thanks to Apogee for enabling Apple Silicon support for this audio interface before sunsetting support. They certainly didn’t need to and I’m very appreciative that they did. 👏

⚠️ Disclaimer

This is a community workaround.

I’m not affiliated with Apogee, and this project isn’t endorsed by them.

Everything is shared as-is, without warranties. Use it if it helps — and use it carefully.