Spotting to a track in ProTools is quite a delicate affair. They haven’t updated their API since the late 1990’s…!

1. Make sure your DAW menu at the top of the screen says ProTools
2. You can’t spot onto an elastic track
3. ProTools can’t have any windows in front(like a task window, or workspace, or anything else… Best to just have the Edit window have focus.
4. ProTools and Soundminer have to be on the same “desktop”. Apple has Spaces to implement virtual desktops, but if you put ProTools on a different “desktop” than Soundminer, the spot command won’t work.
5. ProTools has no way of accepting a bitmask of channels. So if you want to reference original and just spot in 1 channel of a polyphonic file, i’m afraid this isn’t possible. You can pre split your audio files to multi-mono or use copy/convert to extract the channel.
6. The first time you try to spot from Soundminer to a newish macOS, if you accidentally hit DENY spotting will stop working. To re-enable it you have to go to System Preferences, Security & Privacy, then Automation and allow Soundminer to go to ProTools.
7. If you have turned off SIP(Software Integrity protection off, which is pretty tough to do unless on purpose!), then the prompt to add SM to automation won’t happen, and spot to track won’t work. Re-Enable SIP and try to spot a sound until the prompt comes up.