The M1 is also going to cure world hunger and solve global warming
The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
121–130 of 294 posts
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can that secret sauce just be to slow down Intel based macs in the OS layer?
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#123I'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…
It's the OS.
CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one.
On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards.
There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#124Programming 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?
Because it's a slippery slope. Before you know it, you'll be listening to material that can't be produced live.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#125I'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…
Software we use is only available for macOS. Also, Mac mini availability across the world is important. Lastly Mac mini form factor is perfect for the use case.
If you're interested, Intel NUCs mini PCs are available all around the world in the same form factor.
They don't run macOS, so won't run your software though.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That just gave me a nice idea. There's probably a market for "audiophile" eardrops, to lubricate the outer ear, such that the sound waves effortlessly glide through the fleshy waveguide, to hit the tympanic membrane at optimum velocity - or something like that.
There's far crazier out there. https://englishelectric.uk
This is awesome news! Now I only need to find where I can buy some gold-plated Cat-48kHz network cables.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#127They'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.
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Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#128They'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.
I work for an audio company.
Indeed, that's unfair.
Unlike the PPC to Intel transition. This time it's a little easier since most modern toolsets require much less changes in code.
Having said that some consideration to keep in mind:
- audio code needs to be optimized for real time thread constrains. Many optimizations usually made by vectorizing rather than threading that would've lead to locks and synchronization not always possible for real-time processing. So not all SIMD code can be compiled just by changing a flag.
- machine specific code. While rare. Some companies still got such code for various reasons. And needs more complex transition.
- Not all companies were able to obtain DTK. We for example, got our first M1 machine 3 weeks ago.
- Backward support. While we'd like to have universal builds, musicians use their systems for years. We still support 10.7. With Big Sur Apple seems to break SHA1 signs making builds from Big Sur work reliably only on 10.11 or newer. (The first release to support SHA256 codesigns)
- some companies already got Universal builds. REAPER, FabFilter and Adobe Audition are few I can remember.
Keep in mind electron, docker, Homebrew and even other "devs" tools still not fully Apple Silicon ready.
So indeed the above statement is unfair for a small industry (vs finance or other software markets)
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#129Article is pretty light on detail and a bit hand wavy. I’m not sure why M1 is any better at disk streaming samples than x86 based Mac minis either. In fact with a 16 Gb ram limit you can’t put more of those sample libraries in ram. Disk streaming of sample libraries has been a thing for 20 years+. In my DAW the sampler is never the bottleneck. I don’t use the huge multi sampled orchestral libraries but those too have been a thing for years on much more modest hardware than a recent Mac mini. A large ssd array should be plenty fast enough to support it.
If they are using 50 instances of high end software synthesizers, those are cpu bound.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#130They'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 does. Apple provides all AU hosts ability to run Rosetta2 AUs in native DAWs