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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

#251

Post by namibj »

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…

Have you looked at the continuous testing, e.g. [0] for AMD and [1] for Intel? They consistently deliver latencies below 300 us, and for the most part, even lower. Intel largely below 50 us, AMD more around 170 us.

Remember, DAW deployments are not actual hard realtime. If you drop one chunk of samples every night, no one cares.

[0]: https://www.osadl.org/Latency-plot-of-system-in-rack-c-slot....

[1]: https://www.osadl.org/Latency-plot-of-system-in-rack-0-slot....

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#253

Post by sitkack »

egypturnash wrote: post #216
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?

> 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 - a…

> Youtube was completely built around Flash

Youtube exists because of Flash. They were are the right time and place to have a flash object sitting on a webpage that could play video in a reasonably cross platform way.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#255

Post by jackson1442 »

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.

Drivers. Good lord. I primarily use a Mac for both school and work and had forgotten about the nightmare of drivers. I recently purchased an HP laptop for software that only works on Windows and have already had to reinstall Windows since the display driver was completely broken.

I absolutely appreciate how Macs don't really need you to play with the drivers... I've been using them for years and haven't once needed to do so.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#256

Post by joshlk »

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…

Unfortunately it's unlikely Linux will ever run on the new M1 Macs: "Linus Torvalds doubts Linux will get ported to Apple M1 hardware" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25238175

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#257

Post by S_A_P »

djkoolaide wrote: post #138
S_A_P wrote: post #129

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…

Broadway can be a whole different beast. These folks run high polyphony instances of software like Omnisphere and that can still be very much CPU bound even on modern x86-64 chips.

Thats kinda the point I was making. Hints of large sample libraries which omnisphere is a sort of hybrid sample library and synth. It’s also a large library but it’s not the same as huge multi sample libraries that the article mentions.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#258

Post by FireBeyond »

gamblor956 wrote: post #218
cyberdelica wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first

The Atari ST Cubase 1.0 would like to dispute this. I remember sulking because it wasn't available for my Amiga.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#259

Post by blymd »

fmajid wrote: post #254

The M1 Mac Mini will also run much cooler and be more stable.

This is a great point. Heat is always an issue since our Mac minis are always racked up. Depending on the theatre location, it can get quite hot in the pit. We’ve had some computers die in the past from suspected heat issues, so the relative coolness of the M1 Macs is a welcome improvement.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#260

Post by S_A_P »

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".…

Agreed. I outlined my thoughts in a more detailed post but I dont see how M1 changes the game for anyone using Orchestral libraries. SSDs and disk streaming large sample sets multihundred note polyphony has been a thing for 20 years.
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