Apple M1 - A Logic Pro User's Upgrade Guide

hey friend chris van viver here from mylogicprorules.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro well it's been a long time coming almost a year now i've held out for as long as i could but i've finally taken the plunge in the upgrade from that of an intel based system to that of apple silicon with the m1 mac mini and i have the box right here so you can take a look look at that awesome and i have to be the most cautious guy on the internet because it seems like everybody else already has this and in fact i posted in the community tab on the youtube channel just like hey i've got an m1 mac coming i'm going to post a video and many of you were like yeah chris you should i have one it's awesome so clearly many of you don't even need this video but for those of us who are still sitting on the fence still not sure if you should take the plunge i want to share with you my personal journey my subjective anecdotal experience of going from intel to m1 mac just so you can make a decision hopefully with a little more under your belt and if you take a look at the screen here as we live and breathe right now and discuss this topic i'm using the mac mini the m1 to film to work on here in the studio i've got the 16 gig version in terms of memory which i believe was the maximum that you could get for this line of m1 max and the storage is a one terabyte hard drive because the two terabyte was crazy expensive but there you go let's dig into it right now so first the journey of going from intel to m1 transporting and migrating all that stuff from one system to the next well my journey took about like 15 minutes but that's leaving a lot of details out first let me show you just one image in particular but here's just a couple more images of the m1 mac that i have and there's the i o i'm not going to tell you anything you probably don't already know about this thing but it has two usb as two usb c thunderbolt hdmi and a headphone input and this particular screen is the one that i want to bring to your attention because some folks will ask me hey chris how do i move all my stuff from one mac to the next and this is probably your option when you start up your brand new mac apple provides a migration assistant piece of software so you can migrate your stuff from one mac from one time machine backup one startup disk or even windows pc to your newest mac and this is probably the option you're going to want to use i didn't actually use it and i'll explain those two reasons as to why now number one my thought process was when i loaded up this brand new mac that i wanted to be squeaky clean i don't want to adopt any bad habits for my last system my last system was great but who knows maybe i downloaded something maybe i deleted something that i shouldn't have maybe some wires got crossed and if i migrated that exact same system to this brand new architecture maybe it could cause a problem who knows so i just wanted to be squeaky clean so that's why i took very little time to migrate now in terms of all the apps and plugins etc i went to each and every website the app store etc and i downloaded all those things one at a time and then you know found the license files etc it took a couple hours and that was probably the most time-consuming part of the process but i wanted to make sure that my mac just didn't adopt again any bad habits or quirks from my last intel mac so for example i went to the app store and i went right to store view my account and i went and found all the apps that were important to me that i wanted to download basically logic pro i downloaded logic pro i opened it i downloaded all the sound content all over again and i did this native instrument sound toys fabfilter any and all apps and plugins i could think of that you would probably want to know if there was a problem with on the new systems one thing i do wish that i had not been so overzealous and confident about was copying the audio music apps folder just specifically for project templates and presets what i should have done on my old system before i wiped it clean was open the finder hold option click on go and go to the library and under music the audio music apps folder i should have just copied this and then brought it right over to this new system not a big deal i have some of these templates saved in a couple different places but it would have been a little bit easier project templates right there would have had all my templates same thing with the plugin settings and the channel strip settings so second reason i didn't use the migration tool was because pretty much nothing of consequence is saved only on my mac system i have a whole video dedicated to archiving and backing up using dropbox and external hardware or hard drives rather and that's my system i use dropbox to save pretty much everything external hard drives for backing up and archiving and icloud for things like messages and photos so i was pretty much covered across the board in that department so after downloading all of my apps and spending those couple hours getting everything that i needed what were my first impressions well number one this mac makes no sound it has a fan i can feel that there's a steady stream of cool air always passing out of the back of the desktop if i hold my hand right behind it but never makes any noise it never gets hot and the apps just load instantly in fact let's just start popping open apps i'll pop open rx and complete the app store logic pro we can go on and on it takes really no time whatsoever and if we load up an instance of alchemy this was an instrument that i always was waiting on for presets not for a long time but long enough that felt like a drag but now if i just select a preset it's just pretty much instantly available to me that's a big deal to me same thing with electronic drum machine designer if we go right here settings into the library [Music] seems to load fairly quickly and also if we let's load another software instrument with complete because complete was one that i always had to wait on pretty much loads instantly it's pretty awesome so from there how about loading projects because that's the biggest deal right so i'm gonna close all this stuff okay i have a project here that i've been working on with a client and let's just open it logic is completely closed if we take a look down here in the dock no logic pro let's just pop it open and see how long it takes to open up in this current state completely mixed with automation with plugins etc and there it is it took like half a second right it took no time and if we take a look all the tracks are there with all the edits with the automation if we take a look at the mixer all the plugins and routing and this is a fully mixed project so it took no time to open and if we play back and if we work on it it'll work awesome but one thing you should take note of is that there's not a single third-party plug-in in this project and that's for a couple of reasons but it's all logic plugins and so this is an important detail because logic pro out of the gate runs as a native app on this new architecture but many plugins and apps don't have native versions for the apple silicon max yet you know native instruments izotope waves so we need a way to be able to open those plug-ins and those apps reliably without crashing our system or without you know having problems opening our projects and that's where rosetta 2 comes in so let's go to the finder here let's go to the applications folder let's go find logic pro if we right click on the logic pro app and go to get info there's this dialog that offers us the option to open using rosetta and that's exactly it rosetta exists so we can open our intel based apps and plugins on this new system without any hiccups or with far less or a few hiccups than would be normal in this transition and if we close this particular project and let's go to a different project where i had to actually as soon as i got this mac up and running i had to bounce out all these instrumental versions of these songs for live use and if we try to open this project in native mode with logic pro just watch let's pop it open and let's see if logic can open this project with all of its third party plugins from soundtoys and waves and plug and mix and fab filter etc it seems like the dialog has skipped over trying to load the plugins it's loading the audio files and this is where everything stops and in fact i've let this project and several other projects just try to open for 15-20 minutes and it just won't open it will just sit here so i will spare you the agony of having to watch it i'm going to right-click on logic pro and i'm going to force quit because the application is not responding cool so that is where rosetta comes in we're going to pop it on we're going to enable it for logic pro and then open the same project it's going to take a little more time to open this project and you know i'll speed up the video just so we can get right to it let's open it right now you can see in the pop-up screen the title screen for logic pro it says rosetta in gray and i'll speed up the video so we can see the project in his full glory with all of its third-party plugins the project is open successfully and as i said i had to bounce out this project along with many others to export instrumental versions and everything worked as expected if we pop open the mixer take a look around i have third party plugins from sound toys as i said waves plug and mix i think there's some soft tube stuff as well melda slate and in fact let's just take a listen to this synth bass that occurs right here and if we pop open some of these plug-ins we have the plug-in mix retro eq sound toys devil lock waves rbase and prs amp from waves as well let's take a listen to the synth bass watch everything do its thing i'll bypass i'll reintroduce plugins take a listen and a look in fact let's just solo it [Music] yeah everything's working as expected the real benefit of using logic pro on an m1 system is being able to use it in a native mode because that's you know that is the full power of m1 but as we said many of the plugins and apps they're not there yet so you have to make that decision for yourself if it's worth it to you to run at the most optimal experience of m1 or should you use rosetta to use all of your third-party stuff that you've spent your hard-earned money to acquire and use so some of the plug-in manufacturers that i can think of is fabfilter mastering the mix valhalla they're all native now on an m1 system and in fact let's open an instance of logic without rosetta i'll just open it's clean slate logic pro we'll bring in like drummer or something and we'll open some of the native applications within logic pro and now we'll open up drummer and we'll just cycle it and let me just pop open something like fab filters pro q3 so pop that open and there seems to be like a loading time in the native mode of logic pro but everything is there [Music] you know loading something like maybe sound toys let's see sound toys a little primal tap this is not a native application it seems to be working but as i demonstrated earlier trying to open a project that is just you know chock-full of non-native plug-ins might have some problems so that just leaves is there any sort of hiccups or problems that you should be aware of when it comes to the m1 max i've ran into a couple of hiccups nothing that's a deal breaker but some hiccups number one as i was downloading all the different plugins for my m1 system every time i would go to the plugin manager and we'll see if it happens here every time i open the plugin manager it would just kind of freeze and seize up and then i had to quit logic which was kind of weird which by extension some applications seem to kind of hang out of nowhere where suddenly the beach ball of death would pop up and then you know you're waiting and you have to force quit out of the app i've done some reading supposedly this is related to hardware issues and i do have a whole lot of novation controllers from the launch keys to the launch pad um and they're technically not compatible with the m1 max though they seem to work i might have to plug in and unplug some of them from time to time just to get them you know going with the logic pro in the expected manner and the last one which isn't even a problem but to get the most benefit i think from your m1 system is in logic pro you're going to want to go to logic pro preferences and audio and where the processing threads are always on automatic i recommend or ice i feel that it improves in performance by setting this to eight where you get to use all four of the high performance and all four of the high efficiency cores instead of just four cores so if we set this to the automatic logic defaults to using four cores if we go to the cpu here you can see four threads whereas if we set this to 8 and apply we can see the performance meter is going to double in size so all in all i have to see the transition from intel to m1 here in my studio the place that i rely on day in and day out for my livelihood it's been painless it's been satisfying i've had to open old projects with lots of third-party plug-ins and as long as i open logic in rosetta mode it's been of no consequence or problem to me i've had to work on new projects with the new mac system it's been a-okay my controllers that claim to not even be compatible with this new instance of logic pro on the m1 system seem to be working as expected and my interfaces my symphony desktop and my apigee ensemble both are compatible it's been pretty awesome so that's what i want to share with you i hope this has been helpful for you if it has as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic pro rules or subscribing on the website itself ylogicprorules.com every week i'm posting new videos new emails and posts to help you get the most you can of apple's logic pro thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 56,048

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, Apple M1 - A Logic Pro User's Upgrade Guide, Apple Silicon, M1 Mac mini, I just bought an M1 Mac - was it worth it?, Why Logic Pro Rules, waves plugins, Soundtoys, valhalla dsp, plug & mix, fabfilter

Id: xkGPy3wri3E

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021