Mac Studio for Music First Impressions

foreign in this box is what Apple claims is the most powerful music computer the world has ever seen that's quite a big claim and I'm going to find out if it lives up to those very high expectations [Music] thank you foreign [Music] it's super heavy [Music] there it is it's got 128 gigabytes of RAM it's got the maxed out Ultra processor dual processors the whole thing the only thing I've skimped on is the internal solid state drive which I'm going to use there's a two terabyte one in here and we're going to use a load of external ones but look I'm going to set this up and then we can start getting into the real nitty-gritty of how good it is at making music foreign [Music] what I'm going to do now is I will explain quick overview of the advantages of it I'll talk about the difference between running silicon native and Rosetta um and then I'll get into the problems which I've had and the difficulties which I've encountered along the way because you will probably have problems um this is not like moving house this is like moving country you're going from old style Intel chip to a system on a chip which is massively completely utterly different and uh there's lots of things which can go wrong along the way and almost definitely most of my friends with reasonably sophisticated setups have bumped into significant issues as they've gone from the old style to them but put we'll come on to that towards the end look what are the advantages of this uh astonishing system um it's incredibly fast I mean I've got a top of the range this is uh the M1 Ultra it's got 128 gigs of RAM it's got 20 cores it's just you know um and when you first fire it up uh the the basic internal moving around stuff is just what so go um Apple Studio could you move that from there to done it oh Apple Studio could you work out pi to a million done it you know it's kind of oh okay um and those uh kind of performance things have really been translated into practical things uh particularly for people using video um when um our video editor um Hugh everybody say hi to you how are you when he went from a 12 Court um Mac Pro onto an entry level basic M1 Mac Mini the difference was chalk and cheese and so everybody I know who does video has just got no problem I'm going straight on to an M1 no difficulties whatsoever audio people have had slightly more of an issue and the performance issues use the performance gains you'll see even using screaming machine like this um is not going to be the kind of day and night differences that some people have seen on um other um applications of this technology um for a whole range of reasons but the performance increases are tangible and significant this is I've got 225 instruments in here I've got a mixture of contact um I'm running BBC Spitfire stuff and BBC Symphony Orchestra so quite a lot of tracks I've also got a whole load of um Dune synths in here now if you look carefully down in this bottom left-hand Corner this is the performance meter look it's just ticking over it's idling it's hardly moving it's hardly moving the meter at all and however hard I've tried I haven't really got it really to make any serious impact on this CPU so that's why I spent five thousand pounds of my hard-earned money buying this supercomputer so that I can move on and not have performance issues anymore and in that respect it has absolutely delivered other things which are huge advantages listen no I can't hear the fan noise either I can't tell you what a big deal that is actually because I used to have this massive Great PC good Oh it sounded like a sort of you know 747 warming up waiting for it it's just you know yeah I could have put it in a second anyway this it's just sitting under their game uh which is very very nice indeed um so that and the lack of Heat and the lack of power and everything else is really really good okay so um in essence it works uh it works really well but there have been some issues along the way which I will touch on later um let's first of all just for those of you who haven't gone into this yet um there's two ways of running software on a M1 Mac one is a piece of software which is what's called silicon native in other words it's been recode recoded by the developer to run on the Silicon chip and that's no small feat you know that's like taking hmm okay we'll take this novel and translate it into Arabic oh that's not that straightforward is it no it's not and some of them have done it better than others and some of the done it more efficiently than others so there's a whole variety of um ways in which this has been done some of them are blindedly fast and some of them don't get anything like the same speed Advantage depending on how well it's been done the other way you say you say well what about my software my software has not been converted to this silicon thing can I still run this on there my Mac the answer is probably and that's using something called Rosetta Rosetta is essentially well it takes its name from the Rosetta Stone which is all to do with translating languages and so um the Rosetta is an interpreter which takes here's an old style piece of software here's a new style chip put Rosetta 2 in the middle and the two will play with each other but all this translation in the middle takes CPU Cycles so what you're going to end up with is something which runs but at a cost and the cost can be really significant um it can when I was experimenting with an M1 Max MacBook earlier in the year I was getting a 30 performance hit running stuff on Rosetta compared to running it natively and that means sometimes the difference between a performance gain over your old system and a performance loss eventually everything will run silicon native now okay so you want to run uh a rosetta plugin that this is the other thing you need to bear in mind if your door uh logic or whatever is obviously silicon native which obviously logic is because it's run by the made by the nice people from Apple um then you can only run um you can only run if the door is running silicon native then it'll only run plugins which are also silicon native so if you've got 500 plugins you will only be able to run them if every single one of them is silicon native what happens if one is not silicon native the as logic loads it up it will Bim them off it'll say no no sorry you can't run that and it won't come up in the available list um so suppose you desperately want to run the ug 2000 which was this favorite synth of yours which is still running under Rosetta how do you do it um pretty straightforward you uh go you select logic okay here is oh whatever your door may be okay you go command I to bring up the information and if you look at this in the information you see this bit here let's bring it down a little bit so you can see it more clearly if you check that box open using Rosetta now what's going to happen is next time we open logic it will open up um using Rosetta not look do you see this it says version 10.7.4 rosetta in other words it's telling you it's running in Rosetta now when you run it you'll be able to access all those old plugins but at a significant cost in terms of CPU so you pays your money your teeth your choice okay um so if you're going to go on to an M1 Mac you've really got to buy into this whole lifestyle you've just got to go silicon native or bust okay um now this despite the fact that this is not exactly fresh out the blocks this M1 stuff it's been around for quite a while now there's still tons and tons of stuff which has not been converted to um uh the Silicon native Native Instruments contact runs in silica native it runs reasonably well but nothing else that but okay shall we start delving into one or two of the problems we've had along the way and as I say I don't know a single person who's gone on to this who hasn't had some form of problem um okay when I first ran logic um it goes it scans all the plugins does all that thing and it comes to one it doesn't like a good I am very sorry I am not interested in this it comes up with this message uh here we go it says incompatible audio units found okay and you either click continue or start plugin manager whichever one you clicked nothing happened it crashed over and over again and however long you leave it there uh you know I left it overnight still didn't make any difference so this is Apple's own software for evaluating the suitability of plugins and when it finds an unsuitable one it crashes honestly really seriously okay work around work around I know what I'll do I'll take all the plugins out of the plugin folder and stick them somewhere else so there are no plugins then it'll start okay let me show you where the plugin folders are because this may come in handy to you there's two okay if you go okay if you go here again let's get into the zoom in a bit uh on the root of your hard drive you'll see Library go into Library you'll see audio go into audio you'll see plugins go into plugins and you'll see components components is where all your plugins live okay now there's more than one Library folder here's the other here's the other good thing look you also have a user Library folder how do you get to it if you go to go and then you push option watch that menu the library folder pops up yeah now this is a different Library folder okay and so here are all the audio things in here and there's all the plugins and there's any components normally it'll keep all the plugins in one place and not another okay so I get rid of all the plugins and I load the thing up and it still doesn't work look you don't believe me look so here is a screenshot I've tracked I've got rid of the audio unit cache so it doesn't think it it doesn't know what it was doing before I've deleted all the plugins from both folders but look at that it still thinks there are 39 plugins left and one of them it doesn't like and it kept crashing this is logic this is Apple's own program and it still didn't do it properly okay getting slightly frustrated now um I find a solution the solution is uh from a company called Mac poor who made a program called uh clean my Mac X and what it does is it goes through the system getting rid of all the needless junk that is clogging up your system and a lot of the files which are causing these kind of problems are cache files in other words this is a file it's run this process before it's remembered it's run it's before but then it won't forget that it's run it before and so you're trying to get it to go past that point and it goes it's like a toddler you know when you're trying to get a two-year-old to to get on its bike and ride home and it sits down the road says no and you know oh please this is what it felt like okay and it does seem stupid that I've spent 5000 pounds on a Apple Studio you know possibly the last super computer I've ever have to buy and yet to get Apple's own program running I have to spend 30 pounds on a piece of software made by these excellent people MacBook to sort it out I think there's a problem there right anyway moving on um another problem I had was uh Disk Utility okay so um every Navigator Drive gets slightly corrupted and you or you you need to go into um Disk Utility and repair stuff okay so you go shift command U up comes the utilities folder you open Disk Utility and then it will allow it inspects all the drives and then it allows you to do first aid and all that Malarkey so I put a drive in and it go it's an HFS drive formatted for the last version of um Apple because I was using Auto with other drives which wouldn't recognize the new one it says oh no can't repair this drive it's too badly damaged copy everything off quick really really okay I go and plug it into an old Intel Mac run Disk Utility is oh right no problem I'll sort that out for you fixed it okay so this is M1 Mac won't fix an Apple Drive but an Intel Mac will I then have any more serious problem now I have an eight terabyte drive which is no small investment and I go I need to reformat it won't do it what no sorry not interested okay so this is uh running on the Apple Studio I then go back to uh Monterey this operating system running on an Intel Mac and it still won't do it eventually I go back to an Intel Mac running an earlier version of the operating system and disutilities erases the drive and everything's fine so there are problems with USB there are problems with Disk Utility there are problems with um the evaluation tool um I have had um a couple of other issues as well while we're on the subject um one of them um you know Small Things Cubase runs great contact broadly speaking runs pretty well I have had some issues uh with it forgetting um its um some of the instruments and you have to relocate them when it loads and it's not the end of the world um but it's the kind of thing which you could live without really but then you know this is the problem is and this is I think uniquely a problem which we're not maybe uniquely but it's it is a problem which we audio people have you see we're not just using that one Central piece of software like Premiere whatever we're using all these pieces of software produced by all these different people all over the world so this dozens of developers have to get this right for the whole thing to work and it doesn't always work so you must expect if you go on to an M1 there to be some fairly significant bumps along the road okay um you really don't want to have to use Rosetta because you might end up with worse performance than the machine you came off however you there's no point in saying oh I'll wait I mean we if you can wait wait but if you're gonna if you need to buy a new Mac there's only one game in town and that's the M1 chip so or M2 Chip or M3 or whatever else it is by the time you watch this um so we're gonna have to bite this bullet if you want to use a Mac okay here we go here's that problem I was talking about but oh where's it gone uh there you go contact comes up says one or more of the contact instances recalled correctly uh cannot be recalled correct uh correctly so then it opens up and the first time you open contact it says please find these files and you go yeah sure and then it finds them it lives but it's just another little thing which uh you can probably live without um but this is all part of the pain of going on to a new system here you go look up becomes then that then you get browse a folder and you then go on to the uh find the folder where you know that particular lot live and you go go on then knock yourself out find the files and he goes whoosh and it goes through and finds him pretty quickly and then you're good to go but look I hope you found this helpful um I'm pleased I've gone on to an end my Mac frankly because the performance increase I'm getting are huge and the lack of noise and heat and everything else is great there is only one way forward and that is making it work with the M1 so I'm gonna I'm sticking in there and waiting for it the various things to get better um along the way however it's going to be a while before all these problems are ironed out and some of the ones which originate with Apple's own software I find surprising really surprising uh so look I mean the advantage from your perspective is that I will be able to use uh you know Mac only software and some of these like logic so we can do some stuff in logic not just in Cubase and things so I'm going to be broadened out a little bit I think so look I hope you found that useful um please just one last plea in the uh in the comments don't turn into a Mac versus PC um you know Civil War it's just they're only tools we're just trying to write music okay if you want to use a PC that's fantastic if you want to use a Mac that's also fantastic I don't want any sort of lobbing grenades Over The Great Divide if you can possibly manage not to do that I'd be grateful thank you very much indeed right that's all for today uh uh I'll be back in the very near future uh with something probably more creative and less technical see you again

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 79,591

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, Apple Studio, Apple Studio review, Apple Studio first impressions, Apple Studio for music, Music Education, Apple Studio composing, Music Production Apple Studio

Id: Y7j7-8tc2gU

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022