Hey guys. After removing the unsuccessfully installed waves 14 of the latest version and then rebooting, the program icons in the tray appeared after about ten minutes and I noticed that the sound icon was crossed out. Going into the system settings and clicking on the sound icon, I received a message „ Preferences Error Could not load Sound preferences pane. “ going into the settings in the Security & Privacy tab, I saw a message System software from developer "Waves Inc" was blocked from loading.


But when I try to allow access, the system settings hang and give an error


I would be immensely grateful for any help because I'm scared to imagine having to do a clean install with tons of plugins and programs.

macOS 12.6.3 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 2021

 

Run ls with grep to make sure anything with "waves" in it is gone in ~/Library/Preferences and /Library/Preferences

Try deleting the preferences plist for system preferences.

open a terminal

Code:

sudo rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist

check that it worked

Code:

ls ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.*

if it is gone restart

sudo shutdown -r now

The file will be automatically be rebuilt by MacOS on start up and reset your preferences to factory default. You'll have to redo your custom preferences. Either way, it's not going to brick your Mac if you remove the file. If it doesn't work try to repair disk and permissions from recovery mode. If you get the error

Code:

"Warning: SUID file System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/
ARDAgent has been modified and will not be repaired."

Run lsregister to probe and reset the launch agent deamon.

Code:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/    
Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

if none of that works you might have to restore from a backup or reinstall MacOS if you have no time machine backup and just learn a lesson. When playing with warez and giving unknown people root privileges bad things can happen sometimes, and it is best to be prepared.

Good luck