Read this if you are having problems installing a Cognitone product (earlier than HN2 version 2.5 or Synfire Pro version 1.5 only) on your Mac (solution applies to error messages "The MIDI subsystem configuration failed" and "Please make sure Macintosh HD can be written to by the current user").
[image 1]Error Messages
If you get the error message "Please make sure Macintosh HD can be written to by the current user" (or any volume name other than "Macintosh HD"), this is because your volume is set to non-standard permissions and the installer can not proceed.
Under rare circumstances, after installing Harmony Navigator on MacOS X, you may also encounter the error message E0543: The MIDI subsystem configuration failed [11]. Required system components could not be found. Please uninstall and re-install the software.
Both errors have shown to be an issue with improperly set file permissions for the volume "Macintosh HD". We still can't figure why this happens, but it seems to be connected with installing and/or upgrading from Tiger to Leopard to SL in some way.
Note that the expected permissions are standard and used by every MacOS X installation by default. The reason the installer can not make the fix itself is that it doesn't ask you for your admin password (we consider this more polite) and 99,9% of all Macs do not show any error message anyway.
Fixing Volume Permissions
In order to fix the volume permissions, please open the "Get Info" panel on "Macintosh HD" and check whether its permissions are set as shown in the screenshot. The volume should belong to "system" and group "admin" should have read and write access.
Caution: Please be sure to not use the option "Apply to enclosed items...", as this will change the permissions of all files on the volume, which is certainly not what you want to do.
After you set the volume permissions, please uninstall and re-install Harmony Navigator.
You can manually uninstall the software by deleting the program /Applications/Harmony Navigator.app and the folder /Library/Application Support/Harmony Navigator, in case you can not run the installer/setup program for some reason.
Preferences Folder Permissions
If you happen to see the message The MIDI subsystem configuration failed [101], this indicates your folder /Library/Preferences can not be written to (sorry for the obscured message. We will change it in future versions). Make sure the folder is writeable by the user account installing the software.
Please contact the customer support, if you still can not run Harmony Navigator after this.