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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

#181

Post by mattnewton »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #148
stephen_g wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but form factor plays into this a lot. You can fit two minis on a single 19” rack shelf, whereas trying to use an iMac or a laptop isn’t as convenient. 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.

The current Mac Pro is available in a 4U rack form factor for US$500 more. Click the “Buy” link: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

Just two of those blows through the budget of 10k for 2 complete redundant sound system given as an example in the article.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#182

Post by Applejinx »

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…

I'm watching MacOS gradually become this, and I'm not pleased about it. I'm pretty sure I understand why it's happening: Apple is managing its full ecosystem for its own benefit.

My concern is that as a fallible lil' human, and moreover one with autism, I find it probably more upsetting than most to have stuff randomly break for no reason. I depend on continuity and repetitiveness to be well. As such I try to operate on computer systems that don't change out from under me at someone else's whim, because I can be thrown into the inability to function, by something at an unexpected level of abstraction blowing up.

This most recently happened under OSX Mojave when my (non-Apple)_apps could no longer check with the authentication server and would not launch. I lost a day to trying to repair my system: Apple had never told me 'by the way, everything you run now has to talk to a server of ours or it'll refuse to launch'. I disabled the functionality, but I can't have things like that going on. It makes Apple the cyber-terrorist they are trying to 'protect' us from.

Again, I understand their motivation as they are a titanic collective entity trying to administrate and tend another titanic collective entity, their userbase, which they feel is a part of themselves.

However, as a lil' human type, I am too deeply committed to maintaining usefulness for lots of older computers owned by other lil' human types, many of whom can't consistently throw thousands of dollars at Apple to stay in the ecosystem as Apple understands it. I find Apple's actions morally reprehensible (granted, among the least reprehensible actors in the world of computers and internet, but still)

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#183

Post by Applejinx »

sharpneli wrote: post #134
mhh__ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a conceptual level they seem allright. The downside is that they don’t actually work as documented. 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 tend…

Mac APIs have indeed worked as advertised for many years.

My own concern is watching Apple pursue a path of driving upgrade purchases through (A) increased performance and (B) breaking older systems or (C) disqualifying them from use of current software.

C is easy and practiced intensely by Apple, which abandons support for older stuff VERY REGULARLY in XCode. This may or may not be better than allowing it to rot and become deeply broken through lack of maintenance, but it's a choice and Apple repeatedly chooses to throw away even the possibility to support older machines.

B happens through rot: things get complicated, and if they don't care what happens to you AND they are changing your machine out from under you, they can just randomly brick it one day and not be a bit sad about it. It was your fault for not buying newer things, regularly.

A is also something Apple's been capable of. You buy into that and if you stay on the bleeding edge, Apple's become pretty good at keeping you riding that wave of the best computers can do, at any given moment. This also (to some extent) helps the older stuff become more affordable as it's left behind: that's positive in its way. 'Bleeding edge' is not the only kind of functionality to have. I've noticed that for music production testing of Apple Silicon, all the test cases are completely unrealistic: 4000 tracks each of which has 10 Space Designers, etc etc. That means the use case is a solved problem: you don't need the new Mac to do it, at any reasonable level. 8K feature film video on the desktop, yeah you can still need bleeding edge for that. Music, no, not at all.

This is also why it's important that Apple not break its own APIs or let them rot. On the whole, the functionality just works, every time, no matter what. This is a serious thing to risk by allowing the platform to become less reliable due to needing to 'churn' it and sell new generations of machines.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#184

Post by eggy »

simonh wrote: post #156
yummypaint wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Im kindof baffled why they insist on a mac mini with such a tight budget. There are linux options too

I think there are several dimensions to this. These are mission critical systems with extremely high uptime expectations. Therefore using highly standardised easily available identical replacement parts with solid vendor support is a must. There are probably several Apple Stores within easy reach of Broadway and Apple Care will get you rapid support and repair if needed. Another aspect is that the audio stack on MacO…

Those seem like good points, however you can build a PC with name brand parts and keep them consistent and going for a decade. AMD has made sure you don't need a new motherboard everytime they move to a new generation of CPU compared with Intel for example. Yes, Apple stores are all over, but rapid support and repair are not inexpensive, which was one of the arguments for why they chose Mac Minis. FTR, I am interested in a Mac Mini for my children's main home computer and also for streaming on our TV. It's pretty neat with the M1 processor! I have a 2011 iMac 27 with an AMD HD6970M with 1 gb (possibly 2gb?), and I still do a lot of stuff on it. I program graphics on it, and play with audio.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#185

Post by Applejinx »

geerlingguy wrote: post #132
amatecha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember seeing ProTools and other audio workstations around my city still running on old 68K Macs for years after the PPC transition because they worked, had crazy-expensive licenses, and were treated more like racked equipment than traditional computers.

Absolutely. That is more the rule than the exception for professional recording studios. Still happening, too. If you bought into many thousands of dollars of gear for Thunderbolt, for instance, or FireWire, the computer is only one small piece of that system, and becomes part of the racked equipment.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#186

Post by unixhero »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #173
rock_artist wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

We've already released a "test" build of Ardour for M1. Because we already support Linux on ARM, it was relatively trivial - the main work was getting our build stack to compile first. Other than that, it just works. The same codebase supports Linux, Windows and macOS/OSX back to 10.8 and PPC.

Bravo, love Ardour.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#187

Post by BostonEnginerd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #179
rubatuga wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux audio support is not good. Macs have much better audio support.

I've been at the heart of Linux audio for more than 20 years. The situation on Linux is not "not good". Most people who comment on it simply don't know what they are talking about. It is fair to say that Macs are easier to get good results with.

I’ve found audio in Linux much easier to work with than MacOS in recent years - the Pulseaudio team has done a great job.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#188

Post by vultour »

andromeduck wrote: post #109
cyberdelica wrote: post #93

Earlier 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

Very light on the details. Is there a prosumer version? Will this increase the quality of my Discord audio?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#189

Post by Joeri »

mistersquid wrote: post #147
EamonnMR wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Apple killed flash. Apple didn’t kill Flash. Adobe did. By failing to deliver a performant and secure version of Flash (under any architecture, but especially mobile), Adobe ensured Flash would be not be viable for the web as it evolved.

Security was indeed an issue, but I feel flash’s performance reputation was largely undeserved. Yes, it was cpu-hungry, too intense to run on the mobile hardware of the day, but that’s because it did things html5 couldn’t. You could do smooth animations and complex games in flash easily that were hard to impossible to do with regular web tech (pre-webgl). When flash died, web animation and web gaming mostly died along with it. Some of that is the engine itself, and some is the flash authoring tools, which don’t have an open web equivalent. Maybe that sort of power never belonged in a browser, but I still feel like we lost something that didn’t fully get replaced.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#190

Post by Applejinx »

arvinsim wrote: post #25
consp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.

Yup, I am also not understanding the need for it to be a mac mini. The new Apple Silicon chips might be a lot faster. But I am pretty sure that audio plugins take a long time to update.

I'm a MacOSX plugin developer, and in touch with others also facing this situation.

I develop on a VERY old machine in order to support backward compatibility way way farther back than Apple will allow: my current plugins will run on PPC machines because those can be used as music DAWs. As such, the machine I'm compiling on is not producing 64-bit AUs that will work, directly, on MI Macs. They work on literally everything up to that point, but Apple finally shanked me, at least w.r.t that compile target. Until then I was able to support PPC to present day with one three-target fat binary :)

Another dev, Sean Costello, told me that older builds of his stuff (pre-2017?) weren't running on M1, but everything built past a certain point (a new version of XCode, that had long abandoned things like PPC and possibly 32-bit support) was automatically working on M1 through the Rosetta layer.

So, depending on the build environment, Apple arranged that the audio plugins don't even have to be updated. Depending on the libraries the plugins rely on (a vulnerability for some of the big names that use bespoke but OLD libraries to do things), some of the plugins might need only a recompile to be native to M1 architecture. And some might be really intractable.

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