Migrating to Apple silicon - issues, solutions, trouble-shooting

[ersatzplanet]

So now we have Pro Mac Mini's starting at $2k...hmm.

Probably more computing power than you would ever need for music production, but the added !/O will sure be appreciated. The woman from Ableton was impressed it seemed.

[SynthBaron]

So now we have Pro Mac Mini's starting at $2k...hmm.

Probably more computing power than you would ever need for music production, but the added !/O will sure be appreciated. The woman from Ableton was impressed it seemed.

I wonder how much latency improves when you have the 800gbps memory bandwidth the M1 Ultra does.

[commoner]

Yea the specs on those are nucking futs.

[dubonaire]

So now we have Pro Mac Mini's starting at $2k...hmm.

Link? I can’t find anything on this.

[Tarocco]

So now we have Pro Mac Mini's starting at $2k...hmm.

Link? I can’t find anything on this.

Mac Studio: https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/

[dubonaire]

Oh right Mac Studio. It’s not really a Mac Mini just has the same footprint.

[Blairio]

Oh right Mac Studio. It’s not really a Mac Mini just has the same footprint.

Yup, not so much a macmini, more a Big Mac

[commoner]

Not specifically an M1 issue, but a related fyi if yer lookin to go native.

Steinberg decided to drop vst2 support specifically if you want to run Cubase 12 native. They want to retire vst2 and are trying to force the issue. I contacted Elektron, they replied that they are aware of this and don’t plan to create vst3 versions of the Overbridge stuff. It’s a standoff. Well, Elektron has never recommended Cubase anyway.

I desire going full native, so I’m stuck either dropping Elektron or going Live (Overbridge works just fine in Live native beta - vst2 vs M1 native is not the issue). Right now I’m feeling like dropping both Cubase and Elektron, lol.

[Whatisvalis]

Not specifically an M1 issue, but a related fyi if yer lookin to go native.

Steinberg decided to drop vst2 support specifically if you want to run Cubase 12 native. They want to retire vst2 and are trying to force the issue. I contacted Elektron, they replied that they are aware of this and don’t plan to create vst3 versions of the Overbridge stuff. It’s a standoff. Well, Elektron has never recommended Cubase anyway.

I desire going full native, so I’m stuck either dropping Elektron or going Live (Overbridge works just fine in Live native beta - vst2 vs M1 native is not the issue). Right now I’m feeling like dropping both Cubase and Elektron, lol.

As an alternative keep an eye on the open source project U-he is collaborating on - probably long term, but will hopefully challenge the VST 3 BS

[rens]

Has anyone been running izotope rx on m1 hardware? My understanding is that it is now native compatible. I won’t be switching over until I know but that runs without pain, as well as all the other stuff.

[commoner]

Really? I thought izotope was stuck waiting for iLok, so I hadn't installed any of it yet. Interesting.

[chriscarter]

Yes using RX 9 Advanced on an M1 Mac Mini, initially running under Rosetta now Native. Totally stable under both and TBH didn’t notice much of a difference when it went Native.

ILok on the other hand is as flakey as hell.

[rens]

Yes using RX 9 Advanced on an M1 Mac Mini, initially running under Rosetta now Native. Totally stable under both and TBH didn’t notice much of a difference when it went Native.

ILok on the other hand is as flakey as hell.

Cool; thanks chris. A reason to upgrade to 9 i guess. Wonder if all the additional ram will improve rx processing. Notice any speedups?

[chriscarter]

We're currently using an 8Gb M1 MM and frankly we shouldn't have got it - but it was bought as a stopgap (in haste and v cheaply) when our previous Intel Mac died. My 16Gb Intel MBP runs many RX tasks faster than RX (Rosetta) on our 8Gb M1 MM, particularly when the M1 has other apps running. I think 16Gb for M1 would be an absolute minimum. Anyway we just ordered a Mac Studio with a lot more Ram.

[jsleeio]

Hector Marcan's been investigating Apple M1 NVMe performance of late and discovered that the write performance is fucking terrible — literally as bad as spinning rust — and somewhat disguised by macOS using a huge amount of RAM to stage writes in, and if you lose power at the wrong time you can lose or potentially corrupt data because while your app thinks it has written data, it hasn't actually made it from RAM to the flash storage yet

Hoping they've fixed that shit in the new Mac Studio, but don't know yet. Follow his Twitter investigations, I guess.

https://twitter.com/marcan42

Doesn't hurt anything I'm doing, anyway.

[jsleeio]

I just setup my M1 Mac Mini as my DIY bench computer. I suspect I will now end up buying another one. They're pretty cheap from Apple as certified refurbs.

Still hanging out for an M1 version of the 2018 12" Macbook. Macbook Air is too big

[SynthBaron]

and if you lose power at the wrong time you can lose or potentially corrupt data because while your app thinks it has written data, it hasn't actually made it from RAM to the flash storage yet

On top of any OS/main hardware caching, this is a problem with any storage solution that has a RAM cache built into it. Hard drives do, and most SSD's. The newer low end SSD's don't have one, so they actually might be more reliable.

Lots of SSD's have a true write speed of 300 MB/second or lower once the RAM cache or SLC cache is filled up too.

In any case, you should be running your computer off a battery backup. Sine wave UPS's are cheap now.

[SynthBaron]

I think 16Gb for M1 would be an absolute minimum. Anyway we just ordered a Mac Studio with a lot more Ram.

I'm glad they didn't fuck around and put 32GB as an absolute minimum on the Studio's. That starting point is pretty much like having 24 gigs of system memory and an 8 gig video card anyway.

[Funky40]

deleted / pointless / was a rant vs. some internet stupidity

[Dilibob]

I am finding the rosette 2 software update in feb helped out a lot of software, so tests without that update are meaningless . A good example is secondlife "game", my initial tests of that had the cpu/gpu going crazy/pegged. Now it runs mostly in the gpu with light cpu usage.

[thisoldmike]

I've been testing Ableton Live 11.1 along with a few plugins on my M1 Air and I have had no real issues, so I threw down on the base (M1 Max) Studio to replace my 6 year old iMac. Apple says it'll ship in about 3 weeks. The M1 Air is a snappy little machine, so hopefully the Studio will be a worthy iMac replacement.

[wasabi]

I've been testing Ableton Live 11.1 along with a few plugins on my M1 Air and I have had no real issues, so I threw down on the base (M1 Max) Studio to replace my 6 year old iMac. Apple says it'll ship in about 3 weeks. The M1 Air is a snappy little machine, so hopefully the Studio will be a worthy iMac replacement.

Let us know how it goes!

[Funky40]

i decided to wait for the M2s to come.
expecting these to have more single core power, which IS what i need the most by far.
So, i canceled my lust to upgrade to a studio. (which would hurt also. so, more time to save up)
....running out of SSD space.......loading more and more plugin FX. or should i say: ...?

[bphenix]

Hector Marcan's been investigating Apple M1 NVMe performance of late and discovered that the write performance is fucking terrible — literally as bad as spinning rust — and somewhat disguised by macOS using a huge amount of RAM to stage writes in, and if you lose power at the wrong time you can lose or potentially corrupt data because while your app thinks it has written data, it hasn't actually made it from RAM to the flash storage yet

Hoping they've fixed that shit in the new Mac Studio, but don't know yet. Follow his Twitter investigations, I guess.

https://twitter.com/marcan42

He also clarifies later that they (Asahi Linux) are doing the exactly the same thing and it is a valid approach for performance management. The debate is not whether this should happen but what is the timeout size and whether it should be tunable and that there a performance bug that appears when an app explicitly calls the f_fullfsync command which is not something that happens in all apps but it is critical for transactional databases. He also clarified that generally the drive performance is just fine, it is only in that specific use case where shit goes bad. There is also a side conversation about data-durability and whether that should be opt-in vs opt-out but that largely breaks down to whether your biases are shaped by working with production systems, transactional databases or systems that support them on a regular basis and how deep those scars are.

That said, desktops have the potential to see issues (and corruption is very dependent and if a program is dealing with critical data should be able to mitigate, though with performance penalty) with power loss since there isn't a hardware cache + capacitor to provide power until the cache clears. UPS is still your friend if you have critical use cases. Laptops have a built in UPS so this isn't an issue (even when you run out of battery until shut down, the OS flushes the caches before shutdown). The nice thing is that the specific f_fullfsync bug could be improved greatly via a firmware fix is mostly likely.

For those considering a Mac Studio, one thing that I didn't know was that the fans, while very quiet and doesn't seem to change regardless of load, run all the time. It is at a very low level and perhaps many won't notice it but I don't think I want it on my studio desk so I'll likely tuck away on the floor or in a closet so I don't hear it. My current studio is extremely quiet as I doubt I'd hear it if I was still in my city house given the general background noise in cities is so much higher.

While not precise, I used a low grade noise meter and it said ~40db when right up close to the Mac Studio and ~35 db when it about 30 (1 foot) away from my keyboard. This is in my office which has a higher noise floor than my studio but I forgot to measure off so perhaps not useful.

[bphenix]

double post.