Anyone use an M1 Mac with a DAW yet?

Not bought one yet and haven’t used Logic for years but this series of videos from an actual sound engineer really shows the power and potential of the Apple silicon running optimised software.

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Yes I use one with Ableton 10 Live Suite. So far I’m really impressed. I couldn’t use the Wavetable synth on my i5 MacMini without it glitching. Now it works faultlessly.

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let’s all make a flash mob @ Intel HQ and trash our Intel CPUs collectively :grinning:

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I’m in the same boat (I expect a lot of us are) and wondering when is the right moment to buy. I’m using a work laptop for software development and really just using my own MacBook for casual music noodling. I’ve watched a bunch of videos and aside from the usual self-promoting crap the general tone seems to be that most music software works OK Under Rosetta and that the performance is really excellent even on the base Mac mini or MacBook Air.

I may break the habit of a lifetime and get in relatively early just for the fun of it. If I keep my old MacBook I can fall back on that if necessary. Only small issue is that if they release an M1X or whatever it’ll be even faster but I won’t be too fussed. My 2013 MacBook Pro still runs well and if the new M1 mac runs well for 3-5 years then it’s money well spent. Based on benchmarks I’m seeing I think it’ll be more than enough for most people unless you’re a top 5% power user doing 4K video processing or 3D graphics every day.

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Not my video, but I was exactly curious about the same thing a few days back and found this

Edit: That said, I’m planning on my next machine being an M1 (or by then, M2?) flavor of some kind.

Maybe you‘ll find this thread helpful: Apple goes to ARM

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The CPUs aren’t the problem. It’s an architectural problem.

A “normal” computer contains a multitude of separate components which communicates with each other. This makes the design very flexible and customizable (CPU/RAM/GFX/IOs etc.pp.), but also slow (already just by the physical distance between the chips).

What Apple has done with the M1 is to put almost all of these normally separated components on a single chip. They treated flexibility for speed and less power consumption. With the M1, for example, the amount of RAM is fixed and cannot be extended, but the CPU which is on the same chip as the RAM can read and write to it with speeds not possible otherwise. The same holds true for the graphics subsystem and the io controllers. Everything’s fixed, but fast like Speedy Gonzales.

A company which main focus is to produce CPUs and only some of the other separate components simply cannot compete unless they start to produce also such SOCs.

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M1macmini here with bitwig. works flawlessly and fast. some vsts aren’t working (convology) and overbridge

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Good layman’s explanation thanks for that I hadn’t understood it like that till now.

“Disco sucks”

You sound like robo cop forcing us to obey the stupid covid laws but behind the scenes paid by the industry and want us to work with shitty CPUs!

WE ARE (M)ONE! Let’s keep on ravin’ :grinning:

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Focusrite have released a beta version of the Clarett Thunderbolt driver for the Mac M1.

I can now record all 8 Digitakt tracks, 4 Digitone tracks and 6 Monomachine tracks via my Clarett Pre4 in to Ableton on my MacMini M1 at 64 samples with no glitches … very happy :slight_smile:

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I use an M1 Mac mini for production currently. Performance is surprisingly good even in non-native apps, and the only issues I’ve really had with compatibility are issues with Big Sur in general. It’s amazing how little I feel like an early adopter, I just feel the normal growing pains that always come with updating macOS. If you can handle that I recommend getting one sometime down the line, once everything is native there won’t really be any going back.

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anyone using an M1 with Console 1 and Ableton? so far I can it use it as an AU plugin but track-follow does not work. it’s a shame it’s not integrating as well as it should.

Softube’s plugins are not ready for M1 yet according to their website…

To my surprise a lot of plugins aren’t officially supported but are working without issues. Other than the track follow problem I mentioned, Console seems fine.

Installing all my Softube plugins right now, thought they wouldn’t work… hope it works indeed!

Update: it kinda works with some hiccups… I was running Logic in native mode and had to switch to rosetta mode because the UI’s were crazy big and wouldn’t fit the screen. Also had to turn off opengl rendering for the UI’s because there were glitches in the Parallels UI. Modular took a crazy long time to scan and failed eventually but worked after a rescan…

Some nice machines are on the way… should b available around winter I guess…

M2

:slight_smile:

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Don’t want to start a new thread. Anybody using a combination of mac mini m1 and a ssl2 interface and could say something about the combo?
We are moving soon and I plan to go mainly itb until we find a house (4-5 years). I think I’ll get the combo for the time until.

Good timing on the bump.

My 2015 iMac is showing its age, and the PC I bought in March to replace it is no good for audio because, well, Windows, so it’s going to the loungeroom for games. Which means I still have to replace my iMac at some point.

Considering the M1 Mini, but have read some reports about dodgy bluetooth… Anyone got any experience with bluetooth peripherals on the new Minis?