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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

#191

Post by agumonkey »

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.

It's an interesting point though.. even if linux can bring you the best but requires 'too much' work for the average audio engineer it's gonna flop I assume. You need balance to survive.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#192

Post by Applejinx »

Daho0n wrote: post #34
cehrlich wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you stopped using Macs before CoreAudio was invented, I don't really even know what to say, other than I'd have run away from running digital audio on an Apple II, too :)

Your bad luck was that you bailed out of the MacOS audio subsystems just when they started to get good.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#193

Post by emcq »

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…

Check out sse2neon as a way to substitute your x86 SIMD instrinsics for ARM neon. Perf was good enough to ship in one of the past projects I worked with.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#194

Post by TheCowboy »

mehrdada wrote: post #15
camhart wrote: post #3

Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64? I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.

I ran a multithreaded poker solver (a Windows executable) on top of Wine on Rosetta on base MacBook 13 M1 and it beats the performance of base MacBook Pro 16 inch (Intel 6-core) with Windows running on bare metal by a small margin. (M1 fan actually turned on, which is a rare occurrence; at the same time MacBook Pro 16 Intel would be frying my laps. Ballpark estimates on the internet seem to pin it down beating MBP16…

What solver are you running? What kind of performance do you get with these setups? I'm curious because I only hear about more core-heavy builds for piosolver. Thanks

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#195

Post by bentcorner »

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 set up a VR performance in a gallery once. It was supposed to run the same piece of a basic program for 3 months.

Windows 10 LTSC is a good fit for this type of scenario.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#196

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#197

Post by aluminum96 »

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.

My experience with linux audio as a casual user (hobbyist composer and arranger) was awful. This was about two years ago -- I remember trying to install Jack, completely screwing up my audio configuration, and then spending days mucking around trying to get Pulse Audio working again at all. I never could get my sound card working, and had to nuke my Fedora installation and reinstall. It was a nightmare. (This was around three years ago, on Fedora 25).

While I don't doubt that Linux can be great for audio, if the configuration befuddled someone with a CS degree so badly, I think most ordinary musicians don't stand a chance.

N.B. Compare to something like Soundflower on Mac at that time, and it's no contest -- almost foolproof to set up.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#198

Post by gumby »

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…

> ...you have to run […] under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails.

Have there been stability issues with Rosetta? I haven’t seen reports but I’m not switching right away so may not just be looking closely enough.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#199

Post by fay59 »

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…

You can produce two signed binaries, one for <10.11 that is signed with a SHA-1 and one for newer systems that is signed with SHA-256. Your update framework would have to know which one to pull, but that seems surmountable.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#200

Post by rock_artist »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #152
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…

> With Big Sur Apple seems to break SHA1 signs making builds from Big Sur work reliably only on 10.11 or newer. (The first release to support SHA256 codesigns) Affinity Photo is an Arm/Intel universal binary that’s also compatible with OS X 10.9. Maybe look into what they’re doing?

I guess they're building on Catalina as we expect to do so until Apple or us/some other devs would find a way to use prdocutsign/codesign with backward compatibility on Big Sur
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