The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

They&#x27;re going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW&#x2F;music ecosystem is notoriously bad at these kinds of transitions. Due to how VSTs work, if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails. And a lot of plug-in makers are going to want you to pay for an upgrade to the latest version that is released with ARM support.<p>That said, 4-5 years down the line when this whole transition is over on macOS, it&#x27;s going to be great. And for anything not relying on live synth&#x2F;processing, you don&#x27;t need many&#x2F;any plug-ins at all, so that&#x27;ll work well today.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m really looking forward to doing real-time &#x2F; live audio set-ups on my M1 Macs under Linux as soon as next year. The design of the M1, beyond just performance, is almost certainly much better than any x86 box for real-time processing, and likely capable of much lower latencies (due to x86 junk like SMBIOS and their power management approach killing worst case latencies; x86 can&#x27;t match ARM embedded systems for real-time stuff, but M1 <i>is</i> from the embedded world). And since it&#x27;s Linux, all the open source stuff is already ported to ARM, and the wine hack I use to run a few Windows VSTs ought to be compatible with shoving them under qemu-user without disturbing the rest of the set-up.

I&#x27;m puzzled why there is such a strong dependency on Mac? I mean, the M1 looks pretty nice; but if the author is budget constrained AND the hardware is too slow, wouldn&#x27;t &quot;normal&quot; computers with Windows&#x2F;Linux make much more sense anyway?<p>I fondly recall how a good friend of mine was impressed by the compute performance of the Apple based workstations at her university. I convinced her to get a PC for the same cost as the Mac, and then she complained how slow the university Macs suddenly felt. (That was ca 2014).

Programming has been my &quot;day job&quot; for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, tails, etc.)<p>This blog post confuses me, because is he playing the VSTs live? Why not trigger bounced audio instead?

This is a very badly written article and I&#x27;m not sure why it has so many comments and points.<p>There is no real content. No real impact is mentioned.<p>It says they used Mac Minis which they had to reduce the sound quality to use. OK.<p>&quot;Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s an output. What is the impact then?

Wow so it turns out that Broadway (!) had really bad digital sound until Apple came out with its revolutionary new design. When you go to a show next year, you&#x27;ll be able to hear the quality of the M1. And it will only get better with the M2, the M3, and the M4.

Couldn&#x27;t you use a PC box built for less than $600. Sound does not require near the bandwidth of video, and I am sure you could get a decent rig setup for that price. I have been doing low-latency audio on Windows for over a decade. I have used Ableton on Windows with my Novation X-Station 25 from 2005, and I play with Extempore[1] for livecoding, and Windows has been more than adequate. I used the X-Station as my soundcard at the time, because it was better than my cheap PC at the time. I also work for the Entertainment division of an engineering company and we do (did before COVID) lots of mechanical&#x2F;structural work for Broadway.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extemporelang.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extemporelang.github.io&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constraints.<p>What is the complexity with sample libraries? Until now I thought they were just big collections of categorised MP3s, and surely Mac Minis can handle those. I guess I&#x27;m missing something.

20 years ago, the audio software industry could have decided to support Linux. Some notable players in the industry tried to convince others to do this (e.g. Waves). It didn&#x27;t work.<p>Plugin makers, DAW makers all refused to go down that path, despite the possibility of liberating their highly complex, deeply technical products from the whims of Redmond and Cupertino.<p>At that time, Linux already had better latency than OS X or Windows. It would have provided access to faster, bigger systems than anything you could run OS X or Windows on, and access to ARM &quot;early&quot; too. The industry could have actually convinced people that they need specialized computers, not off-the-shelf laptops and desktops to do this stuff (still largely true). But more or less nobody wanted to play.<p>And now, in 2020&#x2F;2021, just as when the PPC-&gt;Intel shift happened under Jobs, because Apple tells them all to dance, they will.<p>It&#x27;s sort of pathetic, even if all &quot;understandable&quot; from various points of view.

<i>&gt; Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not.</i><p>It&#x27;s a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.

Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64?<p>I&#x27;ve read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven&#x27;t seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.

I can’t be the only one to misread the title as “Broadwell”, and scratching my head extra hard at the reverse timeline (Broadwell was an Intel design produced from ~2014-2108)

The M1 is also going to cure world hunger and solve global warming

Great article, too short. I thought music union rules forbade the use of synthesizers that replaced humans, e.g. horn and string sections.

&gt; and I’m very excited to see, or hear, what happens.<p>The cynic in me says the sound budget will get cut further.

What high end sample libraries do they use? Also to be fair the Korg D1 sounds perfect for this and only around $600 each...

The M1 Mac Mini will also run <i>much</i> cooler and be more stable.

very curious to know about this - what kind of code doesnt run on mac mini and windows computers ? What about linux. where is the complexity coming from ?<p>is it because of the synthesizer software makers write very bad code,etc ?<p>i would have thought that a modern iphone 12 pro would be sufficient to run synthesizer libraries

As written the piece seems to imply that there&#x27;s new hardware for every show. If true - why on earth?

&gt; Budget constraints<p>&gt; Mac Minis

Shill

&gt; Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not.<p>&gt; Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner, and it’s only going to get better with M2, M3, and M4-series chips in the future. The performance per dollar characteristics of Apple Silicon machines are going to have a huge impact on Broadway’s sound, and I’m very excited to see, or hear, what happens.<p>What will happen is probably that your budget will get reduced, since you don&#x27;t need as much to deliver the same quality as today.

I&#x27;m sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I&#x27;m surprised that they&#x27;re not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints.<p>This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn&#x27;t really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.

I think the impact is the value of Intel MacBook Pros will be extremely high for a long time. Last I checked, most musicians don&#x27;t replace their rig &amp; buy new software because Apple disrupted their computing platform. Drivers for Firewire adapters, old sequencing software, maintaining access to old projects are all things Apple doesn&#x27;t care about.<p>Anecdotal: I sold my 2011 MBP to a musician. Best machine I ever owned, but will never buy another Mac.

Article is pretty light on detail and a bit hand wavy. I’m not sure why M1 is any better at disk streaming samples than x86 based Mac minis either. In fact with a 16 Gb ram limit you can’t put more of those sample libraries in ram. Disk streaming of sample libraries has been a thing for 20 years+. In my DAW the sampler is never the bottleneck. I don’t use the huge multi sampled orchestral libraries but those too have been a thing for years on much more modest hardware than a recent Mac mini. A large ssd array should be plenty fast enough to support it. If they are using 50 instances of high end software synthesizers, those are cpu bound.