Ableton on Mac M1

The Lounge Other Gear
#61

I have to disagree with you on the restrictions on mac OS. You can change a lot of behaviors using the commandline or with 3rd party mod applications (that are mostly free). Furthermore there’s brew, a package manager which lets you use your mac almost like a linux machine. In the end it’s a BSD variant with a proprietary DE running zsh.
My biggest gripe with mac OS is that the application ecosystem is a lot more expensive than Linux.

OP: ask your roommate if you can borrow his mac mini for an afternoon with a new account for you, try out what you want to know and decide for yourself.
My 2c: if your choice is between Windows or mac OS and you don’t play games, go with the mac mini. Despite all the drawbacks mac OS might have, in the end it’s a lot less frustrating on a daily basis.

EDIT: a big plus of the mac mini is that you can just pop it in your backpack along with a USB C hub and go to your friend’s place or studio for a jam session.

2 Likes
#62

most of the NI stuff works now, even the ones that previously wouldn’t install (eg Massive X). Cypher 2 and all other Roli/FXpansion synths (as well as BFD3) also work no problem.

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#63

Thanks. Good to know. Just last week I still had issues with the installer on the latest Intel MacOS version (couldn’t install more than one item at a time). And their support document only lists a few effects as officially compatible with Rosetta. No even speaking of native (haha) right now. But if things seem to work in general, that’s something, at least.

#64

How about Razor (via Reaktor), do you know if that works as well?

#65

unfortunately I don’t own Razor but Reaktor 6 works no problem (via Rosetta) as do the Reaktor-synths that I do own (eg Monark etc.)

#66

Thanks!

#67

I have the opposite view. While I like Mac and own more Mac’s than Windows PC’s, the restrictive Mac OS sometimes drives me crazy. You can only install programs on the boot drive. Libraries should go in the Libraries folder. (Some programs get around this and let you move your sound libraries to external drives, and some don’t.) Windows lets you install to any drive which makes it much easier to manage a small boot drive. I’ve been using Mac’s for 25 years and keep hoping it will change, but instead the Mac OS seems to get more and more controlling.

#68

At least when it comes to libraries, you can definitely install and move them to another location/disk – that functionality is provided by most programs. In the cases where that’s not possible, it’s not due to macOS restrictions. But even in those cases, macOS allows you to use symlinks to place your libraries wherever you want them. And macOS’ comparatively orderly installs make it much easier to know where the bits and pieces of an install can be found (eg for a proper uninstall) than on Windows, where you can never be quite sure where stuff lands.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s entirely legitimate for you to prefer the way Windows handles installs, but I think the inflexibility of macOS is often exaggerated in these discussions, in particular for everyday users. That and in a way, the fact that Apple does dictate the user experience more than Microsoft with Windows ultimately leads to a more coherent and streamlined UX across the board, at least in my eyes.

My trajectory has been from nearly two decades of Windows to a good decade of Mac and now supplementing my M1 macbook air with a Windows desktop that I built.

I also get that people have complaints about Mac hardware, since in the last years of running Intel chips, the industrial design of their laptops in particular just wasn’t compatible with the thermal realities of the chips they used (plus the shitty keyboards at one point etc etc). But the M1 releases are really something else, I just thought the other day, in a way they’re not talked about enough, they really are somewhat of a revolution in the computing space when it comes to price-to-performance-to-size ratios.

In the end, I’m happy for everyone to use what they feel most comfortable and excited about, personally I feel the M1 Macbook Air and M1 Mac mini in particular are the best deals in higher performance computing in like 30 years or so, so I am happy to recommend them.

1 Like
#69

2012 minis still best minis

#70

I completely agree that Apple’s installer system is vastly better than Windows, thought it’s been a long time since I’ve touched Windows so that could have changed.

The trouble with the symlink strategy is twofold: First, you have to be pretty deep into unix/linux knowledge to know about this and be comfortable attempting to pull it off. The bigger problem is that Apple disk support is just … awful. Apple can’t cache to save it’s life, despite Unix having the best disk caching outside of mainframes for most of it’s history. This becomes clear when you have multiple external disks, and File dialogs insist on spinning up every g*ddamn disk before the dialog becomes responsive. My solve has been to ignore the built-in Fusion drive in my mac and put everything on an (expensive!) 2TB USB3 SSD. All of my other external drives are optional archival drives that are usually switched off unless needed.

There is a third, potential, problem. Apple doesn’t like filesystems and is progressively making them harder to use in OSX.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a better solution. Linux audio is fine if you want to code your music, but coding is my day job and music is a way to get away from that.

Edit: despite all this, I’ll soon be upgrading Ableton on my 5k iMac so it works again. I’ll probably upgrade to a pair of M1s - one for music and one for everything else either at the end of the production run of the first gen M1 or a few months into the second gen - whenever Apple refurbs start showing up.

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#71

Live 11.1 beta adds native support for Apple M1 computers

16 Likes
#72

Good news. Most likely will be purchasing a new mac mini on next iteration then :slightly_smiling_face:

#73

Hopefully they do the same for Ableton 10 rather than force an upgrade I don’t need at the moment.

Be interesting to see if Overbridge works with the native M1 version of Ableton. I don’t have any problems so far on my M1 MacMini with Ableton 10.

#74

i’d abandon that hope, matt

4 Likes
#75

Yeah probably is wishful thinking on my part :grinning:

#76

I realise that I hardly use Ableton for more than a recorder now. I might sell my mega licence. It is doing nothing. I guess Logic Pro (at half the price) is M1 compatible already, right?

#77

Overbridge is already native m1, so when abletom becomes native, it will of course work.

1 Like
#78

That’s new ableton update has a lot in it… many previous updates were minor…

I should learn it a bit more, I use it in a quite basic way atm .

#79

English language version of the release notes - previous link was to the German version

2 Likes
#80

Native M1 support is massive. Now I really hope that Apple release the MacBook Pro everyone is waiting for in October/November.

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