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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

#211

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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 don't doubt that you can do almost anything on Linux if you want, but "easier to get good results with" is a super important consideration that I feel my more dedicated Linux-using friends and acquaintances sometimes undervalue. They'd be horrified at the idea of paying for Rogue Amoeba's Loopback (let alone for a Mac to run it on, of course), but the flip side is that it's a lot easier to do pretty sophisticated audio routing with something like that.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#212

Post by dodobirdlord »

nvrGiveUp wrote: post #94
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…

Entertainers are not Engineers. They fall for marketing significantly easier and use Veblen goods to signal wealth and power. Then they get used to a system and it's all they know. It's more effort to change and they get locked in.

Out of the FAANG companies I can’t speak for Facebook and Netflix, but I can assure you that the engineers at Apple, Amazon, and Google have a broad preference for macOS and Apple laptops. Since the pandemic even the engineers using desktop Linux have mostly transitioned to Apple laptop + remote Linux server.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#213

Post by jtl999 »

marcan_42 wrote: post #45
Reason077 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple put some special sauce in the M1 to help make rosetta fast. Support for the x86 TSO memory model, for one thing.

Also ARM now has a bunch of instructions that are blatantly there for efficient x86 emulation, though ARM won't tell you that in the docs.

IBM POWER9 supports some memory ordering instructions that (as I understand) would in theory be useful for x86 emulation, but a) I'm unsure if anyone actually uses them and b) They are removed from POWER10

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#215

Post by smoldesu »

rubatuga wrote: post #178
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #175

20 years ago, the audio software industry could have decided to support Linux. Some notable players in the industry tried to convince others to do this (e.g. Waves). It didn't work. Plugin makers, DAW makers all refused to go down that path, despite the possibility of liberating their highly complex, deeply technical products from the whims of Redmond and Cupertino. At that time, Linux already had better latency than…

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

You're certifiably insane. Audio on Linux is leagues above the likes of DirectSound, and it consistently outperforms CoreAudio's quality, latency and computational overhead, at least in my testing.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#216

Post by egypturnash »

EamonnMR wrote: post #115
cmroanirgo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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?

> Video making switched from animation to people filming themselves talking to the camera.

Youtube was completely built around Flash, the FLV format hit a sweet spot between "not looking like trash" and "not needing more bandwidth than the average user had" that else had before. I'm pretty sure we would be seeing a shit-ton of people filming themselves talking to the camera even if Flash was still a going concern - animation is a ton of work.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#217

Post by smoldesu »

palimpsests wrote: post #205
eggy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intereste…

building a PC with name brand parts does absolutely nothing to address the critical factor mentioned by the GP: > Another aspect is that the audio stack on MacOS is truly outstanding, with a whole host of professional audio applications and utilities on the platform. Hardware drivers are up to date and also well supported. Connectivity is also well supported by audio hardware vendors.

It doesn't have to be Windows. Linux has had the superior audio stack for the past two decades, and it's considered the standard for most A/V work. Just as there are "Mac exclusive" apps, many Linux/*nix audio tools are never ported to MacOS (for example, the industry staple CALF tools are not actively maintained for MacOS).

The larger point here is that the M1 is not as revolutionary as it's being made out to be. The "flagship killing" multi-core performance is embarrassed by the Ryzen 4800u, which can be found in NUCs that cost significantly less than the Mac Mini. If price were a limiting factor in the industry, we'd probably see more people reaching for those Ryzen machines: but we don't. That's why this article is ultimately self-defeating.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#218

Post by gamblor956 »

cyberdelica wrote: post #80
gamblor956 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most audio software suites were historically dual-OS, or Windows only, for example, Cakewalk, AVID ProTools, and Ableton. Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much i…

> Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. I hate to be that guy, but your entire comment is full of wrong. Firstly, Emagic "Logic" started on the Atari and Mac OS platforms. I'm not sure when it appeared on Windows, but it certainly wasn't a Windows first DAW. The Apple versions of Logic were never "very much inferior" to the Windows versions. In fact, it was the other way around. > Indeed, the whole point of Appl…

Well, if you want to be technical about the history of hardware and software platforms in Hollywood, it was Atari and Silicon Graphics until the mid-1990s, when most studios switched to a combination of Windows/nix for their needs. Apple was briefly in consideration for DAWs/audio work in the late 80s/early 90s, until Windows DAWs started hitting the market in force.

Today, most Hollywood composers use Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first. TV productions favor Studio One, which again, was Windows-first (and from the same developers as Cubase). Pro Tools is industry standard for Hollywood movies...but it didn't become the standard until version 6, running on Windows. Ableton Live, which is the most popular tool for recording live music, was written first on Windows (but originally commercially released simultaneously for Windows and Apple).

And Logic on Mac was very much inferior to Logic on Windows, which is why Windows was the preferred platform for running Logic. The Mac version didn't become better than the Windows version until version 6, for which there was no Windows version. While all accounts say that Logic is a great DAW these days, because it's Mac-only, the only production companies that run Logic are ones that are exclusively Mac-based.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#219

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#220

Post by verall »

kolinko wrote: post #145
himujjal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NVidia has it's own auto-update system, and some other programs as well.

If you don't install the "GeForce Experience", which given your use case, you obviously would not, the graphics driver does not auto update and has no way to do so.
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