Fix Unity 2018.1.9f2 Audio Import issues on macOS 10.15

 in bloggingthumb / macos / unity by

I have recently been porting some Unity 5 projects and have been trying to find the easiest path forward given all the moving parts that the folks at Unity deprecate.

I finally settled on Unity 2018.1.9f2 as the easiest first step forward from Unity 5.  This was based on trying multiple different versions and looking at all of the moving parts that work.

The one issue that was preventing me from using 2018.1.9f2 is that the audio importer FSBTool is a 32 bit binary using 32 bit libraries so audio imports would hang, forever.

I did a bit of research and it seems the folks at Unity know about this problem but because 2018.1.9f2 is “unsupported” they have no plans to release what would be a trivial fix.  In fact they could just silently roll it into 2018.1.9f2, which would be the right thing to do and what I would do if it was my product.

Having said that, you can fix it yourself by copying the 64 bit version of FSBTool from a later version of Unity into Unity 2018.1.9f2 as follows:

  1. In Unity Hub install Unity 2018.1.9f2
  2. In Unity Hub install Unity 2019.3.0f3 (or any version that can import Audio on macOS 10.15
  3. In Unity Hub, for both versions, click on the dot, dot, dot menu and choose Reveal in Finder
  4. In the Finder, for both version, right click on Unity.app and choose Show package contents
  5. In the Finder, for both versions, navigate to Contents > Tools > FSBTool
  6. In the Finder, for Unity 2019.3.0f3, Command+Click on FSBTool and libvorbis.dylib
  7. From the File menu, choose Copy
  8. Select the FSBTool folder in Unity 2018.1.9f2
  9. From the File menu, choose Paste
  10. In the Paste dialog, choose Apply to All
  11. In the Paste dialog, click Replace
  12. In the Finder, for Unity 2019.3.0f3, right click on libmp3lame.dylib
  13. From the context menu, choose Show original
  14. In the Finder, click the original libmp3lame.dylib
  15. From the File menu, choose Copy
  16. Select the FSBTool folder in Unity 2018.1.9.f2
  17. From the File menu, choose Paste
  18. In the Paste dialog, choose Apply to All
  19. In the Paste dialog, click Replace

And that, as they say, should be that.

Now you can import audio files in Unity 2018.1.9f2.

Happy porting.

Leave a comment