131–140 of 294 posts
Anecdotal: I sold my 2011 MBP to a musician. Best machine I ever owned, but will never buy another Mac.
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…
Yeah, when I started out with the first Intel Core Mac Mini, I bounced down most of my effects-heavy tracks, though I did this pretty begrudgingly. Fortunately Logic has a great feature where you can "Freeze" a track to a "bounced"/rendered audio file -- if you want to make edits to the effects, you can un-Freeze, make your changes and re-Freeze. Only downside is, this takes up precious time when you're trying to be…
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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…
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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…
If Mac APIs actually work as advertised then the difference is that windows programs work weirdly (bad sync etc) or have had to spend tons of time making custom code to workaround the badness of their ”professional” audio API, costing way more.
And another example is Android. It’s definitely not placebo that it tends to have horrendous latency. Originally due to design and nowadays due to bad vendor implementations with only Pixel phones reaching iPhone levels of latency. We’re talking about latency in iPhones being only few ms and tens of ms or even more in average android phone. That does actually matter in music production.
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…
Also, while a lot of people use Pro Tools for recording/mastering Ableton (which are cross-platform) for live stuff, lots of shows use Mainstage which is Mac only. Logic is really good for recording and sequencing too and also Mac only.
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…
If performance is really a problem, there were faster Intel Macs than a mini, as well.
If they made a smaller and much cheaper entry-level Mac Pro that had a rack mount kit to fit in 2U or something, that would be amazing for production.
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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.
"Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX" What do you mean? That sounds like its harder to write drivers for soundcards for windows.. But the user is not going to be writing their own drivers. Any user who needs to perform audio with any computer will need a soundcard in order to have any sort of decent quality, for #1 Decent quality inputs and outputs #2 The correct input and output typ…
MS tried a bunch of tech in the past (WinMM, MCIWnd, DirectSound, WaveOut, WASAPI, XAudio2, etc), but none of them ever worked for professional Audio.
The proper solution was always to use ASIO, which is third-party technology by Steinberg. It works but it's not integrated with Windows: it goes directly to the audio interface, bypassing stuff in the Kernel.
This bypass causes some limitations, such as not being able to use the system mixer (which prevents from using media players or multiple audio apps), or sometimes having different audio-interfaces not work well with each other.
There are workarounds to those issues, but they have to be handled by the interface manufacturer when writing the drivers. Also, you can't have low-latency with built-in soundcard unless you use something like ASIO4ALL, which is not super stable IME. This sucks when you want to work on-the-go with headphones.
Of course, it can be very stable when you use the right combination of DAW, drivers and sound interfaces, but when you don't you have problems.
On macOS and iOS? CoreAudio is native and it has super low latency by default. It's mostly plug and play and all apps use it. It even provides APIs to use Audio Plugins or reroute Audio, so DAW writers don't even have to write it themselves (unless they want to). Do you have multiple Audio/MIDI interface? In macOS there's a built-in app to "link" them together.
Article 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…
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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.
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> 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…