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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

#111

Post by EamonnMR »

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…

Saying that synth makers need to 'get their act together' is a bit unfair. Nobody asked Apple to invalidate all binaries, they just went ahead and did it.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#112

Post by ratww »

jamesfmilne wrote: post #89
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.

> Doesn't Logic Pro already support this?

It didn't support it during the 32/64 bit transition, don't know about Intel to ARM. Of course even if Logic does it, there's the other DAWs.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#113

Post by mhh__ »

sharpneli wrote: post #95
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…

I bet macOS audio API's are way better than on Windows. I don't have experience of them myself but I have been burned by Windows ones. I have a small story to tell about this. Windows WASAPI has a way for it to tell you when, supposedly, the endpoint device started the recoding of a buffer. This is important if one wants to have a sync with precision of sub millisecond range. Well. It doesn't quite work like that in…

Nothing about windows audio APIs actually stops them being good enough to do a production on.

Obviously it's not Broadway but I ran the sound for school productions for years, and we were able to quite happily do (increasingly DSP based as the years went on) live audio I/O on literally the worst windows machines you could imagine.

The whole idea that the OS really makes any difference - especially for being "creative" is just a placebo.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#114

Post by [deleted] »

arnon wrote: post #107

This is a very badly written article and I'm not sure why it has so many comments and points. There is no real content. No real impact is mentioned. It says they used Mac Minis which they had to reduce the sound quality to use. OK. "Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner".…

[deleted]

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#115

Post by EamonnMR »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #87
bluedino wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple killed flash. If they will be able to kill x86 remains to be seen. I don't think web users won out because flash is dead though. Web games never recovered. Video making switched from animation to people filming themselves talking to the camera. What will we loose with x86, I wonder?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#116

Post by ratww »

kevingadd wrote: post #71
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…

Couldn't you run a VST host in the Rosetta environment for your x86 VSTs and run everything else native in ARM in a separate host? Or does the VST model require that all the VSTs loaded run synchronously within a single process?

It doesn't require everything to be on the same process, it's just how DAWs are implemented today.

There are alternatives, like the bridges mentioned by the sibling post, but it's clunky and manual to setup and slows down your workflow.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#118

Post by EamonnMR »

sandGorgon wrote: post #101

very curious to know about this - what kind of code doesnt run on mac mini and windows computers ? What about linux. where is the complexity coming from ? is it because of the synthesizer software makers write very bad code,etc ? i would have thought that a modern iphone 12 pro would be sufficient to run synthesizer libraries

The situation is similar to gaming-why work to support a platform that most of your customers don't use?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#119

Post by himujjal »

kolinko wrote: post #90
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. Bec…

Turning off Windows Updates is 10 minute work. And I am no Windows expert. Just got to know this via a youtube video. I am not sure how you couldn't disable updates.

I am not a professional, so I might not know audio stuffs. But manual Windows Updates is easy.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#120

Post by tomcam »

kolinko wrote: post #90
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. Bec…

You ever work with Joanna Klass? Also... the Posterous link in your profile is of course dead
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