The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway • Hacker News Board

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#161

Post by Crosseye_Jack » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #140

Sholmesy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dream that at some point, everyone will get their heads out of their asses and abandon this abusive relationship.

The abusive relationship trickles down no matter which platform you choice. Even on Linux you don’t have full control of all the driver binaries, control of the silicon of everything running on your rig. Even if you were to go RISC V chances are you are going to have to rely on some binary blob for things like your WiFi card.

And even if we over come all those hurdles we still have to convince the avg joe to adopt them too otherwise it will just live in a small costly niche that the wider community just don’t bother supporting.

All we can do is try and pick the least abusive relationship we can afford and is practical to run.

My point is, I don’t it against people for using platforms others may find abusive. Sure us on HN are more likely to be in the position where we can switch platforms for fun just to see how they work out. But for most they simply don’t have the time or patience to swap and learn a new platform (let alone the cash).

Maybe this is a bad example because of what exactly happened with one manufacturer, but it’s why airlines like plane manufacturers to not go too far with design changes because it requires them to retrain their polits on the new aircraft.

If every time you purchased a new car you had to take into consideration that the control system was different between each manufacturer which may even require you to retrain in order to drive it you may very well consider with sticking with what you already know.

So I don’t hold it against anyone who simply wants to keep with what they know. They just want to fire up the platform at get to using it.

Anyways sorry for the rant, just my thoughts on the matter.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#162

Post by vultour » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

avianlyric wrote: post #151

eggy wrote: post #143

Couldn't you use a PC box built for less than $600. Sound does not require near the bandwidth of video, and I am sure you could get a decent rig setup for that price. I have been doing low-latency audio on Windows for over a decade. I have used Ableton on Windows with my Novation X-Station 25 from 2005, and I play with Extempore[1] for livecoding, and Windows has been more than adequate. I used the X-Station as my so…

My understanding of this has been that OSX has always had much lower audio latency than Windows or Linux. Apple have put quite a bit of effort into making their audio sub-systems both performant and reliable. Something that isn’t true on Windows and Linux at the moment. I also assume that part of if is driven by audio professionals using Macs elsewhere, and you don’t want to be using an unfamiliar system when running…

Does Mac have a built-in low latency system? The Windows ones are terrible but I don't think anyone would use them anyway when there is ASIO.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#163

Post by PragmaticPulp » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

yummypaint wrote: post #149

eggy wrote: post #143

Couldn't you use a PC box built for less than $600. Sound does not require near the bandwidth of video, and I am sure you could get a decent rig setup for that price. I have been doing low-latency audio on Windows for over a decade. I have used Ableton on Windows with my Novation X-Station 25 from 2005, and I play with Extempore[1] for livecoding, and Windows has been more than adequate. I used the X-Station as my so…

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

It’s the software.

With consumer and professional software, it’s never as simple as switching to Windows or Linux to get the job done when your entire back catalog of work and the training for the entire team is invested in a specific software package.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#164

Post by PragmaticPulp » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #143

Couldn't you use a PC box built for less than $600. Sound does not require near the bandwidth of video, and I am sure you could get a decent rig setup for that price. I have been doing low-latency audio on Windows for over a decade. I have used Ableton on Windows with my Novation X-Station 25 from 2005, and I play with Extempore[1] for livecoding, and Windows has been more than adequate. I used the X-Station as my so…

The software is the issue. If the entire team has been trained on and built their back catalog of work in a specific software package, switching to a different platform may not be an option.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#165

Post by marcan_42 » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

vimy wrote: post #160

dagmx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they mean performance drop versus native. Let's say you have a DAW with ARM and x86 binaries but a VST/AU/RTAS that's x86 only. You need to run the DAW as x86 under Rosetta, which will result in reduced performance versus a native binary, assuming the native processor was capable of equal performance. Given how zippy the M1 is, that performance penalty may well still put you ahead of where your x86 perf was…

That’s what I’m saying. There is no performance drop compared to x86 macs, the M1 is _that_ fast.

Well yes, x86 macs in those classes were using underpowered Intel CPUs :-). That said, I've yet to see any serious benchmarks of this kind of workload. We know the M1 is fast for single threaded UI code (fast as heck atomics sure help with ObjC reference counting), but that says nothing about SIMD and floating-point heavy audio processing. Rosetta adds overhead to that, potentially a lot vs native ARM code, depending on the code. There is no way to make a blanket "the M1 is so fast it overtakes Intel even under emulation" claim.

I'd personally be more concerned about stability and drop-out issues. Apple sells Rosetta as an "ahead-of-time" translator, but that is necessarily best effort (because true transpiling is not a solvable problem, e.g. self-modifying code). Thus, there is always the possibility that the JIT gets invoked in the middle of the audio processing thread, and that won't end well for real-time guarantees. There are also programs that just don't work under Rosetta properly (for unclear reasons).

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#166

Post by wpietri » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

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".…

It's not an article. It's a personal blog post. The author is conveying personal experience and thinking. It is perfectly well written for that.

I found it interesting and informative about a part of the world I don't have experience in. If you don't like it, that's fine. Not everything has to be for you.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#167

Post by marcan_42 » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

jamesfmilne wrote: post #89

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…

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.

The endianness being the same does not mean data structures are compatible. There are many, many more details about data structure layout that vary between architectures (and even compilers of the same architecture, especially once you delve outside of C).

VST2 is probably doable - what I use to run Windows VST2s on Linux is something similar with an out of process wrapper - but I can see VST3 with its C++ API being a major, major pain in the ass. And even then there are downsides. Running plug-ins out of process has significant context switching overhead. It's fine for one or two or half a dozen, but compare running 50 plug-ins in process and out of process and you'll notice a massive performance difference. You can fight that with larger buffer sizes, but that adds latency.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#168

Post by sgt » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #159

sgt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is a complete mess these days from a usability perspective and even Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about it. As for Linux, rock stable once you get it running (at least the OS itself) but lack of software support and other quirks makes it less desirable on the desktop.

Rock stable?

Solid as a rock?

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#169

Post by marcan_42 » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

rock_artist wrote: post #130

jamesfmilne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's because AUv3 is an out of process plug-in architecture, with the performance overhead that that entails.

See here for why that doesn't scale to serious productions with high track count:

https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#170

Post by marcan_42 » Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

rock_artist wrote: post #128

EamonnMR wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I'm not saying I expect it to be done now, I'm saying I expect a good subset of audio companies to still be dragging their feet a year from now, judging by history. Yours may not be one of those :-)