41–50 of 294 posts
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Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?
Mixer and speakers? Yes.
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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. T…
That said, 4-5 years down the line when this whole transition is over on macOS, it's going to be great. And for anything not relying on live synth/processing, you don't need many/any plug-ins at all, so that'll work well today.
Personally, I'm really looking forward to doing real-time / live audio set-ups on my M1 Macs under Linux as soon as next year. The design of the M1, beyond just performance, is almost certainly much better than any x86 box for real-time processing, and likely capable of much lower latencies (due to x86 junk like SMBIOS and their power management approach killing worst case latencies; x86 can't match ARM embedded systems for real-time stuff, but M1 is from the embedded world). And since it's Linux, all the open source stuff is already ported to ARM, and the wine hack I use to run a few Windows VSTs ought to be compatible with shoving them under qemu-user without disturbing the rest of the set-up.
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?
You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.
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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.
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?
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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.
Sample libraries are pretty efficient compared to digital synthesis VSTs. They really don't hit the processor nearly has hard. But M1 designs that max out at 16GB don't have the memory to handle plenty of sample libraries, so I don't understand how a Mac Mini is supposed to be up to the job. It's not just about raw cycles but about cached access to the samples. The biggest libraries can run up to 1TB and you'll proba…
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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. T…
I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare.
A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".
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It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?
Same reason that people hire a mediocre DJ at a wedding instead of just having a cousin operate an iPod playlist?
Ease and quality of improvisation? Does the musician here improvise? Slight variation in each performance?
> 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.
This sort of "wasteful spending" tends to happen for big budget events for reliability reasons. You might be able to save $10k by reusing equipment from the last event or using a venue's equipment, but if the equipment cuts out mid-show, it will cost a lot more than $10k in missed opportunity. I spent a week hanging out at Circuit of the Americas helping to run a solar car race, and asked about all the loose CAT6 bur…
Nope. Venues and especially the people who rent them can't be trusted with cabling. We now run our own every year, in an efficient combination of above ground and through the wiring troughs. We pull it out when we're done though. Only a couple things -the main internet feed, which is more robust, and the line that crosses halls- stay there to be reused (or fixed if necessary, groan).