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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

#81

Post by exged »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #29
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.

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…

I get that all else being equal, it's better to put everything in RAM, but what point is it just poor software design? 1TB of RAM is nothing to sneeze at. Is there really such a great need for sub-100us read latencies that commodity NVMe SSDs are insufficient?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#82

Post by bluedino »

Sholmesy wrote: post #76
dingaling wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. Why is it their responsibility? Apple has literally billions in the bank, they should be running an incentive scheme if they want more native ports. This reminds me of people complaining that Docker doesn't run on Apple ARM yet. Why should it? Apple are the ones that changed the architecture.

It's naive to think that Apple needs Docker more than Docker needs Apple. If Docker didn't support Apple devices going forward, they would lose a significant amount of users. If Apple doesn't support docker going forward, they lose a tiny percentage point. That being said, its mutually beneficial, so Apple should be putting their best effort to making the transition smooth (which I think, at least from an outsiders p…

Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#84

Post by pvg »

bluedino wrote: post #82
Sholmesy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's naive to think that Apple needs Docker more than Docker needs Apple. If Docker didn't support Apple devices going forward, they would lose a significant amount of users. If Apple doesn't support docker going forward, they lose a tiny percentage point. That being said, its mutually beneficial, so Apple should be putting their best effort to making the transition smooth (which I think, at least from an outsiders p…

Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

Using Apple computers is a part of some web developers' brands. Web developers are at best a tiny niche aspect of Apple's brand.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#85

Post by messe »

bluedino wrote: post #82
Sholmesy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's naive to think that Apple needs Docker more than Docker needs Apple. If Docker didn't support Apple devices going forward, they would lose a significant amount of users. If Apple doesn't support docker going forward, they lose a tiny percentage point. That being said, its mutually beneficial, so Apple should be putting their best effort to making the transition smooth (which I think, at least from an outsiders p…

Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

> web developers are a huge part of their brand

Are they? Maybe in HN's niche community—and it is niche—but I suspect the vast majority of Apple's customers don't remotely associate web developers with the brand.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#86

Post by josephg »

bluedino wrote: post #82
Sholmesy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's naive to think that Apple needs Docker more than Docker needs Apple. If Docker didn't support Apple devices going forward, they would lose a significant amount of users. If Apple doesn't support docker going forward, they lose a tiny percentage point. That being said, its mutually beneficial, so Apple should be putting their best effort to making the transition smooth (which I think, at least from an outsiders p…

Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

You don’t need docker to develop web apps.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#87

Post by cmroanirgo »

bluedino wrote: post #82
Sholmesy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's naive to think that Apple needs Docker more than Docker needs Apple. If Docker didn't support Apple devices going forward, they would lose a significant amount of users. If Apple doesn't support docker going forward, they lose a tiny percentage point. That being said, its mutually beneficial, so Apple should be putting their best effort to making the transition smooth (which I think, at least from an outsiders p…

Apple should care more about this - web developers are a huge part of their brand

... And yet Apple refused flash support on iOS. It didn't hurt Apple, and only strengthened web development by forcing new solutions to appear. Flash, once a big chunk of the web, is now a little more than a footnote.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#88

Post by graeme »

Daho0n wrote: post #34
cehrlich wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’s 22 years ago. Whole other era. Steve Jobs had just returned, so macs weren’t yet intel and they weren’t running OS X yet, using the NEXT architecture.

In other words, you and OP may both be right. Three absolutely massive transitions at apple between your era and theirs: hardware, software and management quality.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#89

Post by jamesfmilne »

marcan_42 wrote: post #43

They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/music ecosystem is notoriously bad at these kinds of transitions. Due to how VSTs work, if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails. And a lot of plug-in…

It would be perfectly possible to run the VST/AudioUnit in a separate x86 process and communicate with the host using shared memory. Thankfully the endianness is the same so data structures are compatible.

Doesn't Logic Pro already support this?

Admittedly it does mean the plugin runs in a separate process&thread, requiring IPC to render each chunk of audio through that plugin.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#90

Post by kolinko »

archi42 wrote: post #77

I'm puzzled why there is such a strong dependency on Mac? I mean, the M1 looks pretty nice; but if the author is budget constrained AND the hardware is too slow, wouldn't "normal" computers with Windows/Linux make much more sense anyway? I fondly recall how a good friend of mine was impressed by the compute performance of the Apple based workstations at her university. I convinced her to get a PC for the same cost as…

Imagine Windows deciding to do a forced auto-update (or hard disk check) ten minutes before performance. Or breaking down because the system doesn’t work well after the update.

I set up a VR performance in a gallery once. It was supposed to run the same piece of a basic program for 3 months.

Since it was Windows we had to do additional steps to make sure that it wouldn’t try to update* and possibly break drivers. Because there wasn’t IT staff around to fix things if it broke down.

I never had such issues with MacOS.

* - additional steps like making sure the built-in wireless is disabled and it doesn’t remember any wifi passwords, so it doesn’t try to fetch any sort of update. Because even if you disable Windows updates, you have a bunch of other drivers that may ignore those settings. And then, if we needed to put anything new on the computer, we had to either use usb-sticks or break the airgap and redo all the testing - so it had to be timed so that we would have at least half a day to fix it if broken.

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