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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

#31

Post by andy_ppp »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #16
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.

I mean it’s totally crazy, emulation of Arm on x86 has always felt extremely slow, to me anyway.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#32

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

gamblor956 wrote: post #19
forrestthewoods wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

There was a lot of Mac-first software too, though - Opcode Vision, for example.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#33

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kabes wrote: post #17
forrestthewoods wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

A lot of small-shop semi-DIY VSTs used to be Windows only. That's not so true these days. It's been a while since I found a VST/AU that wasn't at least dual platform.

But having run music on Windows for a long time, I would never ever go back. The telemetry, random updates, and general awfulness of the user experience are not something I want in my life.

MacOS has issues, not least the breaking changes in Catalina and Big Sur. But when each OS iteration settles down it's generally super-stable and - most importantly for professional use - it doesn't get in the way.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#34

Post by Daho0n »

cehrlich wrote: post #18
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.

As a former sound engineer I can state for a fact that this is not true. We stopped using Macs while I was still doing it and it was back in like ~98 when we moved for real to digital studios. Depending on what we were doing the only thing the Macs gave us were bigger purchase and support bills. What Apple had going for them was history so people didn't know as much about how to support the setup if it wasn't Macs. The non-Apple software was just fine and the hardware, at the same price point, way better.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#35

Post by Reason077 »

consp wrote: post #21
gamblor956 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.

Besides software and familiarity, I'm sure the Mini's form factor has a lot to do with it.

Also, if you need to replace or duplicate a unit with an identical one, you know you can always run out and easily find replacement Mac Minis. If you used some random ultra-SFF PC, can you be sure you can get another identical one easily if you need to? What about 3 years from now? Changing out hardware always introduces a possibility that something might go wrong - exactly what you don't want on a broadway show, a few hours before a performance!

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#36

Post by robbyt »

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion.

It's absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, tails, etc.)

This blog post confuses me, because is he playing the VSTs live? Why not trigger bounced audio instead?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#37

Post by Reason077 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #31
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean it’s totally crazy, emulation of Arm on x86 has always felt extremely slow, to me anyway.

Apple put some special sauce in the M1 to help make rosetta fast. Support for the x86 TSO memory model, for one thing.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#38

Post by fab1an »

robbyt wrote: post #36

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It's absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, t…

It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#39

Post by bumblebritches5 »

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…

It's absolutely not a lossy codec like MP3, it's CAF or Core Audio Files.

I believe they use Apple Lossless compression, but they might be straight up AIF (Apple's version of WAV basically straight up audio)

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#40

Post by closeparen »

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.

A Designer at this level (Sound, Lighting, Projection, whatever) specifies the best possible rig for her vision for this show within her budget. The production rents the gear, the performance space, and the stagehand hours to put it together.

No one likes being stuck with the landlord's choices. A designer would have worked on shows like that (work with what the venue has) earlier in his career, but not after graduation to the big leagues.

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