Project Milk Drop as a native Apple Silicon program without Rosetta2?

The new version of Project Milk Syphon from Aud 2025, I believe the release notes say that it was updated for Apple Silicon, or perhaps MSL. But when I open it, it wants to run in the Rosetta translation layer. I prefer not to install Rosetta (so I can easily see which apps require it).

Would supporting native M1 be a large undertaking in regards to changing the code? And is the code available online, such that i could give it a look and try to answer my own question? Thank you.

Or maybe it is just the installer, from this message.

I believe ProjectMilkSyphon is adapted from ProjectM

https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

Since it is a free app and built off other existing codebases, I doubt it will be completely rewritten for Metal. Maybe someone will vibe code that together one day, but I can’t imagine that being worth a thousand dev hours when you could just install Rosetta and be done with it…. (imho)

I guess I shared the wrong links. In the VDMX 6.2 release blog, it was mentioned:

ProjectMilkSyphon is now updated for Metal, with new features including favorites, history, playlists, and direct audio capture from other applications. Use with any Syphon enabled app.

For it to be updated to metal, I don’t fully understand, but I would assume it would also be updated for ARM64. I would look in the code myself, but I don’t know where to look for it.

It’s definitely a ProjectM front-end, I work with that project. i.e. https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm/issues/924

I talked to one of the ProjectM developers and they agreed that this Rosetta2 error might just be the installer, and it might be a setting in info.plist

This might make more sense to the devloper, and have an obvious solution. I tried to dig into it and I’m going to dump my notes with the hope of cirling back around to it.

  • Check the app binary architectures:
    lipo -archs /path/to/YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourAppBinary

  • Check if it’s truly universal:
    file /path/to/YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourAppBinary

Virustotal has a neat feature where it will show you a bunch of info about an executable. I wasn’t able to dig into ProjectMilkSyphon 3.9 beyond this, because I have an Apple Silicon Mac.

Notes: