Difficulty installing Biosig after EEGLAB install on Macbook

I’m a really rudimentary Matlab/EEGLAB user, and I’m also PC literate rather than Mac. I have a student I’m onboarding to be a research assistant who uses a Macbook, and we have installed Matlab and EEGLab successfully on her machine, as well as the frontal asymmetry toolbox, using the Add On manager in Matlab. EEGLab opens fine on the Macbook and we have since tried to open an EDF file using the Biosig tools option. EEGLAB then attempts to download and install Biosig (which on my PC has always gone smoothly). However, my student keeps getting this message:

"Could not download extension. Host site might be unavailable, too slow or you do not have permission to write in the EEGLAB plugin folder. Try again just in case or use a faster connection.

Alternatively install the plugin manually by downloading it at http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/EEGLAB_Extensions_and_plug-ins

unziping it in the eeglab/plugin folder and restarting eeglab"

We have downloaded Biosig from the host website and attempted to manually place it in the correct folder in EEGLAB on the Macbook, but when we attempt to open the EDF file, EEGLAB continues to try to download Biosig itself and gives us the same error message. The error message occurs regardless of what wireless network she is on, whether at home or at the university. We have checked the permissions of Matlab folder to ensure she can modify it, that’s fine. Is this problem particular to the Mac OS? How do we get this running?

[Andrea Hunt]

We continue to have this prioblem getting Biosig installed on Macbooks - two different machines at this point. Both are fresh, new installs of Matlab (v. R2022b) and the full EEGlab version (not from github) of 2020.0 (28.8 MB). When we try to import edf files using Biosig for the first time in eeglab, we cannot autoinstall Biosig as has worked on my work PC. We have attempted to manually install Biosig with experienced Matlab users from our university, and we continue to get this error message. They suggest there may be missing files from our version of eeglab. I have submitted Issues in both eeglab and biosig Githubs but I'm also asking here if anyone knows what may be causing this problem.

Answer 1

[Anthony]

I have the same issue trying to install any plugin for EEGLAB, both manually and through the interface. I'm also a Macbook Pro user with an M1 processor. I would appreciate any kind of guidance.

Answer 2

[Nora Moser]

I ran into the same issue (July 2023) after installing the latest version of EEGLAB through MATLAB's add-ons button, but was able to fix it by closely reading the README-md. There is mentions the EEGLAB folder should contain 4 subfolder: /functions /plugins (mind the plural!) /sample_data /sample_locs. It seems the error message incorrectly advises to install in the plugin (singular) folder. After fixing the typo in the subfolder name, and adding the folder to the path, the manually installed Biosig plug-in could be found and used.

Answer 3

[Andrea Hunt]

We were finally successful after installing the most recent update of EEGLAB, the biosig install worked fine after that. EEGLAB developers told us it was a firewall issue, but the problems prior to that were occurring regardless of what wireless network we were on--at home or at our institution. Whatever changed in the latest version of EEGLAB seems to have done the trick.