Apple Mac Mini M1 For Audio and Video Production | 3 MONTHS ON!

back in november we released a short series of videos covering the mac mini m1's performance in various production related tasks from audio editing and mixing to video production and exporting we were mind blown by its performance in audio related tasks but we were less than impressed with his video performance with certain codecs at least it's now three months later and we've had plenty of time to work with the new mac in our studio it's been assigned to audio duties from ground up productions mixing and mastering to editing the audio for these very youtube videos you'll be pleased to know that in general this is a great machine it's general performance and speed is great and everything from loading large logic projects to everyday usage is snappy and responsive in comparison to my previous experience with my last purchase of an apple product it's a godsend last year i purchased the new at the time intel macbook pro and my goodness was it horrendous the trackpad would stop working randomly the keyboard would do the same the whole system would randomly freeze the screen would go black and i even had issues opening most third-party apps even basic ones such as google chrome after many support calls with apple and three yes three replacements i asked apple for my money back and i wrote it off as a bad year for the intel macbook i've been using the mac m1 as my daily machine for a couple of months now and i have to say for 699 quid it's a pretty awesome computer not only have i been working on some ground-up production projects in logic pro with channel counts and virtual instruments up in the 50s and 60s which is quite high for me but i've also edited a few videos myself and have been using a lot of as yet unsupported plugins and unsupported audio hardware and almost everything has just worked with one caveat everything has just worked inside apple's own native software logic and for video editing final cut but not so well in non-native daws i generally use studio one for mastering as i love the export functionality of it the superb metering and i can easily create ddp files for cd production something we haven't been able to do in logic since apple discontinued wave burner but we had a lot of issues trying to run studio one four on the new mac so i upgraded to the latest version studio one five and whilst that seemed to work well using the plug-ins supplied with it load up third-party plug-ins and it's game over again in many instances such as with the slate bundle as soon as you load the plug-in it will present you with a load of graphical bollocks with loads more graphical bollocks hidden underneath it and it's generally completely unusable using logic however it's a completely different story every currently unsupported third-party plug-in i've tried in logic just works and works really well so we've been using the new mac for production and mixing projects in logic but i'm still going back to the old one for mastering in studio one hardware integration has also been largely flawless many people have asked me if avb still works and the answer is yes it works fine any usb interface we've plugged in has just appeared in the drop down menu straight away and the only thing that does make me a little bit sad is that our trusty focusrite clarity83x is currently unsupported and just won't work focusrite's website confirms that and the device shows up on the system ripple when using a thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 adapter but isn't selectable in any software as an audio interface focusrite said that this isn't an issue with the big smurf operating system but with the actual m1 architecture itself so i'm hoping they will come back with an update on that because that interface has some of the cleanest conversion i've ever encountered for running audio out to hardware and back in again and we love it for that reason production aside everything else on the new mac just seems to work better even the internet if james is uploading a video using the wi-fi down at the other end of the building on the old mac i'd have to wait for several minutes just for gmail to load up and i had no chance at all of either downloading or uploading projects from clients on the new mac it's like nothing is going on he can be uploading a youtube video and i can watch something else on youtube in here and it just works not only does it work but it's generally a better experience so generally it's been a great experience for me and if i got to the stage where i thought that a laptop would be useful i'd have no hesitation at all in picking up one of the new m1 machines apple have pretty much nailed it in terms of the performance of these new computers ram doesn't seem to be the potential bottleneck it once was indeed with the new architecture i don't think you can reliably compare specs on paper with previous intel machines at all it just doesn't seem to work like that anymore i'd still advise you to wait if you're not a logic pro or final cut user and remember that models in the current m1 lineup aren't pro machines they're base models we'll see the pro machines further down the line hopefully sometime this year however here's a pro tools user experience and it's very different to my experience with studio one okay so here's where it gets really fun i started loading up plugins on this new session and i put in insert one the seven band eq the stock pro tools eq on insert two i put the compressor on insert three i put low five on insert four i put a stereo reverb deverb the stock pro tools reverb and then on insert five i put a stereo delay so i thought i wonder if this computer will be able to handle if i put those same five plugins on all 126 tracks you can see that the cpu usage is hovering around 38 or 39 with 126 reverbs going in a laptop that cost less than half the price that that trash can did we're seeing greater performance many thanks to cult caparoon for giving us permission to use part of his video the link to his full video is in the description below it's well worth a watch and don't forget to subscribe to his awesome channel while you're there he did a great studio build a while back again well worth a watch so what are the downsides to the new m1 james one major issue we've found with general day-to-day usage but this is something we completely expected to happen is that if we're working on an old project from our 2014 max desktop drive we can't save any changes or write to the disk the reason for this is that the old disk is formatted to ntfs and the new mac uses apple's own ap fs file system so whilst you can read from the old drive you can't write back to it but as i said this is to be expected and we got around the issue by simply importing any older projects we needed to revisit onto the new mac m1s internal hard drive and then continuing from there then we export to our newly purchased apfs formatted desktop driver for archiving of course if you're physically working on projects on an external drive we'd definitely recommend a thunderbolt 3 or usbc external ssd rather than a mechanical disk but the reasonably sized 256 gig ssd inside the mac is enough to host most sizeable projects once those projects are completed simply export them to an external disk for archiving that's what we do and it just works well using this method secondly the biggest issue we've had bluetooth problems already widely known by most people in the mac community these can be a right pain although it hasn't happened a lot of times it's happened enough to be irritating apple's own bluetooth keyboard and mouse will randomly disconnect and there's no way to get them to reconnect you either wait it out or you force restart the computer by holding the power button how this got through the quality controller apple we're not really sure considering the apple keyboard and mouse is what most people would be using with it but there are certainly issues there so we've invested in a good old-fashioned wired keyboard sometimes you just can't beat a cable hopefully there's a new update which can fix this issue rather than a full recall job to fix the hardware talking of updates mark did have a morning of issues when he updated the system to mac os 11.2 earlier this week and just had this on the screen once the computer restarted a call to apple and a quick reinstall solved the problem but it would have been a morning of lost time had it not have been for the old machine let us know down in the comments if you've bought one of the new m1 macs and what your personal experiences with them we'd love to hear from you and remember create don't hate if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and ding ding dong or i'll come to your house and i'll install windows 95 on your mac you'll see us in the next video thanks for watching you

Channel: PresentDayProduction

Views: 79,505

Rating: 4.9383669 out of 5

Keywords: Mac Mini M1, Apple, 3 months on, music production

Id: lAcDkL4r3yc

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021