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The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

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Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#11

Post by monocasa »

sleavey wrote: post #8

> Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constr…

They use samples as a base, but do heavy amounts of DSP to get the final product, these days up to simple ML models.

Think being able to create new virtual backup singers who you can play like a piano, pretty much on a whim, who sound convincing to the kinds of people who work production on broadway.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#12

Post by crooked-v »

walterbell wrote: post #6

> Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not. It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.

Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#13

Post by gamblor956 »

sleavey wrote: post #8

> Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constr…

Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#14

Post by supernova87a »

walterbell wrote: post #6

> Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not. It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.

Probably no different from each professional cook in a kitchen bringing his/her own knives to work. Are you going to rely on the crappy "house" equipment that everyone shares and you have no idea what quality it is? I suppose also that a theater has no interest or incentive to keep the equipment top notch, etc. or well-maintained (or is even qualified to do it).

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#15

Post by mehrdada »

camhart wrote: post #3

Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64? I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.

I ran a multithreaded poker solver (a Windows executable) on top of Wine on Rosetta on base MacBook 13 M1 and it beats the performance of base MacBook Pro 16 inch (Intel 6-core) with Windows running on bare metal by a small margin.

(M1 fan actually turned on, which is a rare occurrence; at the same time MacBook Pro 16 Intel would be frying my laps. Ballpark estimates on the internet seem to pin it down beating MBP16 6-core i7 and trailing MBP16 8-core i9 on pure CPU performance benchmarks, power obviously much lower; GPU far better than Intel UHD 630 and close but not quite as good as Radeon 5300M.)

For most applications that aren't especially pathological for Rosetta (e.g. V8 x64), it seems not more than 10-30% slower than arm64.

(Don't feel too surprised. If your binary is static code, it is pretty much a static compiler from x86 to ARM [albeit an incredibly well executed one], so not magic: in fact if you disable SIP on your system, you can peek into the translated executables in `/var` and look into them via `objdump`/`otool`)

--

Another benchmark that is a bit worse for Rosetta:

Compiling gRPC from clean source (not quite Apple to Apple comparison cause under Rosetta, it runs LLVM x86 codegen vs LLVM arm64 codegen outside Rosetta and I did not want to mess with the flags). I also feel like process creation under Rosetta can be more expensive, but not sure.

- MacBook 16 (i7-9750H, 16GB): 67s

- MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB): 48s

- MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB, Rosetta): 85s

Now I have my Intel Macs to list on Craiglist...

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#16

Post by gogopuppygogo »

camhart wrote: post #3

Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64? I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.

There are various benchmarks on YouTube showing the performance is reasonable. Native code is obviously faster but with rosetta it seems like the M1 is a mid tier Core i5 or Ryzen 3 series in performance. Not bad at all but not top tier.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#17

Post by kabes »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #4
sneak wrote: post #2

I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change…

Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.

I don't know how it was historically. But I got this typical thing where I think more software and gear will make me a better producer and thus I buy almost every big daw, software synth and all plugins I come across and have yet to find the first thing that doesn't run on windows (apart from logic pro obviously)

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#18

Post by cehrlich »

sneak wrote: post #2

I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change…

I don't know about the present state, but certainly 10 years ago you would have had to be out of your mind to use anything but a Mac in an Audio setup that is used for important live performances - the Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#19

Post by gamblor956 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #4
sneak wrote: post #2

I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change…

Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.

Most audio software suites were historically dual-OS, or Windows only, for example, Cakewalk, AVID ProTools, and Ableton. Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW.

Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much inferior to the Windows versions.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#20

Post by Razengan »

srockets wrote: post #7

I can’t be the only one to misread the title as “Broadwell”, and scratching my head extra hard at the reverse timeline (Broadwell was an Intel design produced from ~2014-2108)

I also thought Broadway was some Intel CPU or some console GPU.. oh it's actually the name for an ATI GPU
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