20 ms·

The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

242 points by da02 6y ago

sneak 6y ago
I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. 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't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Ableton Live, the only one used for live performance by any of my circles (admittedly, in the electronic music scene, not Broadway) is cross-platform. Logic Pro is, of course, Mac-only as it's made by Apple. We're not talking about an organization moving to Windows here, we're just talking about a single, appliance-like keyboard-input-to-audio-output computer for someone to play music on in a live Broadway show. TFA writes about buying the machine new for that single purpose. There aren't really "switching costs" in the traditional sense in that circumstance. TBH I think it's just an ad. The circumstance (we have to buy two brand new computers for every run of a show!) and claimed impact are just too contrived. EDIT: Further supporting the idea that it's just an ad, every other post from this domain on HN is promoting a product.
    - blymd 6y ago
      An ad? For what? Don't think too much. It's pretty easy to understand. 1. We use Macs because we need MainStage for these shows. 2. Mac mini fits the form factor. 3. Faster Mac mini means we can do cooler stuff. Easy.
  - kabes 6y ago
    I don't know how it was historically. But I got this typical thing where I think more software and gear will make me a better producer and thus I buy almost every big daw, software synth and all plugins I come across and have yet to find the first thing that doesn't run on windows (apart from logic pro obviously)
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      A lot of small-shop semi-DIY VSTs used to be Windows only. That's not so true these days. It's been a while since I found a VST/AU that wasn't at least dual platform. But having run music on Windows for a long time, I would never ever go back. The telemetry, random updates, and general awfulness of the user experience are not something I want in my life. MacOS has issues, not least the breaking changes in Catalina and Big Sur. But when each OS iteration settles down it's generally super-stable and - most importantly for professional use - it doesn't get in the way.
    - blymd 6y ago
      MainStage doesn't run on Windows, and it's the software all the shows use. Even shows that use Ableton Live for playback sometimes use MainStage as a frontend software controller hooked up via IAC.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Most audio software suites were historically dual-OS, or Windows only, for example, Cakewalk, AVID ProTools, and Ableton. Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much inferior to the Windows versions.
    - Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
      There was a lot of Mac-first software too, though - Opcode Vision, for example.
    - cyberdelica 6y ago
      > Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. I hate to be that guy, but your entire comment is full of wrong. Firstly, Emagic "Logic" started on the Atari and Mac OS platforms. I'm not sure when it appeared on Windows, but it certainly wasn't a Windows first DAW. The Apple versions of Logic were never "very much inferior" to the Windows versions. In fact, it was the other way around. > Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. The fact of the matter is, practically all "audio professionals" of the time period of which you refer, used Apple computers - either for MIDI sequencing, or Digital Audio Workstations. Windows computers weren't even a serious consideration. Those who didn't, still used Ataris, or hardware sequencers/recorders. Pro Tools, originally by Digidesign, was Mac only for years also.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        Well, if you want to be technical about the history of hardware and software platforms in Hollywood, it was Atari and Silicon Graphics until the mid-1990s, when most studios switched to a combination of Windows/nix for their needs. Apple was briefly in consideration for DAWs/audio work in the late 80s/early 90s, until Windows DAWs started hitting the market in force. Today, most Hollywood composers use Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first. TV productions favor Studio One, which again, was Windows-first (and from the same developers as Cubase). Pro Tools is industry standard for Hollywood movies...but it didn't become the standard until version 6, running on Windows. Ableton Live, which is the most popular tool for recording live music, was written first on Windows (but originally commercially released simultaneously for Windows and Apple). And Logic on Mac was very much inferior to Logic on Windows, which is why Windows was the preferred platform for running Logic. The Mac version didn't become better than the Windows version until version 6, for which there was no Windows version. While all accounts say that Logic is a great DAW these days, because it's Mac-only, the only production companies that run Logic are ones that are exclusively Mac-based.
- cehrlich 6y ago
  I don't know about the present state, but certainly 10 years ago you would have had to be out of your mind to use anything but a Mac in an Audio setup that is used for important live performances - the Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    As a former sound engineer I can state for a fact that this is not true. We stopped using Macs while I was still doing it and it was back in like ~98 when we moved for real to digital studios. Depending on what we were doing the only thing the Macs gave us were bigger purchase and support bills. What Apple had going for them was history so people didn't know as much about how to support the setup if it wasn't Macs. The non-Apple software was just fine and the hardware, at the same price point, way better.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      This era was kind of a low point for the Mac. The dying days of both PowerPC and MacOS 9, overpriced underperforming hardware, and the slow painful transition to OS X. Things started to improve after 2006 when Apple switched to Intel.
    - cehrlich 6y ago
      I remember working with some Windows 7 setups and having to deal with stuff like WASAPI Drivers and ASIO4All, having to daisy chain MIDI through the out on synths (which introduced jitter) because there is only one system MIDI in and out, etc. Perhaps there was a way to get these things working smoothly, but on the Mac all this stuff just worked out of the box. My situations were probably edge cases in terms of how much gear was connected to a single computer, but still. I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare. A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".
- Reason077 6y ago
  > "Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows" Mac Minis are relatively cheap. Not much different in cost to comparable, branded, ultra-small-form-factor PC hardware. (And now, with the M1, I don't think you'll find competitive PC hardware in the same price range and form factor at all)
  - mehrdada 6y ago
    I am a huge M1 fan but that statement is almost true, but not quite there yet. I have experimented with a number of prebuilt machines with AMD Ryzen 3600X/3700X, Intel i7-10700, and Apple M1. Those (esp 3700X) are often slightly ahead of M1 (esp in Rosetta) usually at slightly cheaper prices [often discounted too] compared to the base model Mac mini, admittedly at a much higher power consumption, noise, physical size. The delta increases quickly if you have to pay $200 more for only 8GB RAM (which is the max and sometimes the real bottleneck) and overpriced SSD. If you need Rosetta, you are still probably better off with a mid-range Ryzen PC, assuming you're not married to macOS. I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance). I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1. On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      As you say, you're comparing a far higher TDP chip here (Ryzen 3600X/3700X). I don't think those can realistically fit into the Mac Mini's form factor, right? Surely we should be comparing the M1 to the "U" series Ryzen chips?
      - mehrdada 6y ago
        I was comparing M1 to higher TDP chips, yes. If you take TDP into account M1 wins hands down, of course (unless your workload requires more than 16GB RAM). The context of this post is specifically the price-sensitive customer, not a TDP/space-focused one (compare to this[1] for example, once you upgrade RAM and SSD, and install a decent cooler). You also get better I/O in the PC world. [1] https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7814504/HP-Pavilion-TP01-0066-Desktop-PC/ https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7814504/HP-Pavilion-T...
- ratww 6y ago
  It's the OS. CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one. On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards. There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.
camhart 6y ago
Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64? I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.
- mehrdada 6y ago
  I ran a multithreaded poker solver (a Windows executable) on top of Wine on Rosetta on base MacBook 13 M1 and it beats the performance of base MacBook Pro 16 inch (Intel 6-core) with Windows running on bare metal by a small margin. (M1 fan actually turned on, which is a rare occurrence; at the same time MacBook Pro 16 Intel would be frying my laps. Ballpark estimates on the internet seem to pin it down beating MBP16 6-core i7 and trailing MBP16 8-core i9 on pure CPU performance benchmarks, power obviously much lower; GPU far better than Intel UHD 630 and close but not quite as good as Radeon 5300M.) For most applications that aren't especially pathological for Rosetta (e.g. V8 x64), it seems not more than 10-30% slower than arm64. (Don't feel too surprised. If your binary is static code, it is pretty much a static compiler from x86 to ARM [albeit an incredibly well executed one], so not magic: in fact if you disable SIP on your system, you can peek into the translated executables in `/var` and look into them via `objdump`/`otool`) -- Another benchmark that is a bit worse for Rosetta: Compiling gRPC from clean source (not quite Apple to Apple comparison cause under Rosetta, it runs LLVM x86 codegen vs LLVM arm64 codegen outside Rosetta and I did not want to mess with the flags). I also feel like process creation under Rosetta can be more expensive, but not sure. - MacBook 16 (i7-9750H, 16GB): 67s - MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB): 48s - MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB, Rosetta): 85s Now I have my Intel Macs to list on Craiglist...
  - TheCowboy 6y ago
    What solver are you running? What kind of performance do you get with these setups? I'm curious because I only hear about more core-heavy builds for piosolver. Thanks
    - mehrdada 6y ago
      I tried PioSolver free version with identical settings on all machines and targeted a certain exploitation level and compared the time it took to finish the task. Performance on M1 is close to a desktop 3600X (admittedly weak cooler was installed on that machine)
walterbell 6y ago
> 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. It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Probably no different from each professional cook in a kitchen bringing his/her own knives to work. Are you going to rely on the crappy "house" equipment that everyone shares and you have no idea what quality it is? I suppose also that a theater has no interest or incentive to keep the equipment top notch, etc. or well-maintained (or is even qualified to do it).
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Mixer and speakers? Yes.
    - nradov 6y ago
      The speakers that sound good for country music don't necessarily work well for hard-core gangster rap. Bigger acts especially prefer to bring all their own gear in order to ensure a consistent sound in every venue.
  - forgingahead 6y ago
    This is commonplace in the US, less so elsewhere.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  Production companies are ephemeral and tour multiple locations. Depending on the production they may require different sorts of equipment to accommodate different performance skills. It's totally unfeasible for a venue to stock a wide enough menu to satisfy a variety of productions, and likewise totally unfeasible for a production that shows up and has mere hours before showtime to adapt to someone else's instrument rigs beyond the basic necessities of PA. You can rent but it's often better to buy as cheap as you can to eliminate complexity and risk.
srockets 6y ago
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)
- Razengan 6y ago
  I also thought Broadway was some Intel CPU or some console GPU.. oh it's actually the name for an ATI GPU
sleavey 6y ago
> 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. 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'm missing something.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 6y ago
  They use samples as a base, but do heavy amounts of DSP to get the final product, these days up to simple ML models. Think being able to create new virtual backup singers who you can play like a piano, pretty much on a whim, who sound convincing to the kinds of people who work production on broadway.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.
  - consp 6y ago
    Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.
    - arvinsim 6y ago
      Yup, I am also not understanding the need for it to be a mac mini. The new Apple Silicon chips might be a lot faster. But I am pretty sure that audio plugins take a long time to update.
Nabati 6y ago
> 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. > 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. What will happen is probably that your budget will get reduced, since you don't need as much to deliver the same quality as today.
andy_ppp 6y ago
What high end sample libraries do they use? Also to be fair the Korg D1 sounds perfect for this and only around $600 each...
- sonotmyname 6y ago
  A Kong D1 is just a keyboard- it can’t run Mainstage, store gigs of samples, or run a DAW...
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I know, the point I’m making is (if you read the article) you don’t have to spend $3000+++ on keyboards. The D1 has an amazing action but is still reasonably priced. Used as a midi keyboard with all the things you mentioned it’s fine/designed for exactly this.
robbyt 6y ago
Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It'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.) This blog post confuses me, because is he playing the VSTs live? Why not trigger bounced audio instead?
- fab1an 6y ago
  It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?
  - jzwinck 6y ago
    People go to Broadway shows to see live performances, and music is a big part of it (in some shows, the biggest). You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Actually, what is the reason for that? If we had computer-linked humans act a scene, then record all of their interactions, and then have them perform that ten nights in a row as live marionettes replaying their original actions from the computer, is that worse or better? Does the potential for failure and variation attract the audience? Or just the fact that the medium is much higher fidelity: stage actors are human, three dimensional, and no other medium can record all the subtleties of motion and expression just as well.
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        It's not the fidelity, it's the human factor. An concert, a play, or any other live performance is much more than a single night, 2 hour performance. It's countless hours of practice, errors, emotional up & downs during the journey. The performance one watches is the tip of the iceberg and the underlying depth is what amazes us as humans. The unmistakable performance or real-time and invisible improvisation during the show. I used to played in a symphony orchestra. Even the slowest of classical pieces is a storm for the orchestra, if not for the spectators.
marcan_42 6y ago
They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/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. That said, 4-5 years down the line when this whole transition is over on macOS, it's going to be great. And for anything not relying on live synth/processing, you don't need many/any plug-ins at all, so that'll work well today. Personally, I'm really looking forward to doing real-time / 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't match ARM embedded systems for real-time stuff, but M1 is from the embedded world). And since it'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.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Couldn't you run a VST host in the Rosetta environment for your x86 VSTs and run everything else native in ARM in a separate host? Or does the VST model require that all the VSTs loaded run synchronously within a single process?
  - TylerE 6y ago
    It’s within one process. There are ways to bridge it but basically you have a native plugin shim that talks to a process running the target arch and essentially passes protocol messages back and forth. Was common for a while on windows when many plugins were 32bit only and wouldn’t run in a 64 bit host
  - ratww 6y ago
    It doesn't require everything to be on the same process, it's just how DAWs are implemented today. There are alternatives, like the bridges mentioned by the sibling post, but it's clunky and manual to setup and slows down your workflow.
mahkoh 6y ago
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'll be able to hear the quality of the M1. And it will only get better with the M2, the M3, and the M4.
- hans1729 6y ago
  This put a smile on my face, happy holidays
- sgt 6y ago
  In fact, it'll eventually get so good we'll be the bottleneck. We're gonna need new ears, folks.
  - cyberdelica 6y ago
    That just gave me a nice idea. There's probably a market for "audiophile" eardrops, to lubricate the outer ear, such that the sound waves effortlessly glide through the fleshy waveguide, to hit the tympanic membrane at optimum velocity - or something like that.
    - andromeduck 6y ago
      There's far crazier out there. https://englishelectric.uk https://englishelectric.uk
      - dxdm 6y ago
        This is awesome news! Now I only need to find where I can buy some gold-plated Cat-48kHz network cables.
        layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
        http://www.audiodrom.net/en/special-edition-reviews/104-ethernet-rj-45-cables-shootout http://www.audiodrom.net/en/special-edition-reviews/104-ethe...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
archi42 6y ago
I'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't "normal" computers with Windows/Linux make much more sense anyway? 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).
- sgt 6y ago
  Windows is a complete mess these days from a usability perspective and even Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about it. As for Linux, rock stable once you get it running (at least the OS itself) but lack of software support and other quirks makes it less desirable on the desktop.
  - woah 6y ago
    Rock stable?
    - sgt 6y ago
      Solid as a rock?
- kolinko 6y ago
  Imagine Windows deciding to do a forced auto-update (or hard disk check) ten minutes before performance. Or breaking down because the system doesn’t work well after the update. I set up a VR performance in a gallery once. It was supposed to run the same piece of a basic program for 3 months. Since it was Windows we had to do additional steps to make sure that it wouldn’t try to update* and possibly break drivers. Because there wasn’t IT staff around to fix things if it broke down. I never had such issues with MacOS. * - additional steps like making sure the built-in wireless is disabled and it doesn’t remember any wifi passwords, so it doesn’t try to fetch any sort of update. Because even if you disable Windows updates, you have a bunch of other drivers that may ignore those settings. And then, if we needed to put anything new on the computer, we had to either use usb-sticks or break the airgap and redo all the testing - so it had to be timed so that we would have at least half a day to fix it if broken.
newintellectual 6y ago
As written the piece seems to imply that there's new hardware for every show. If true - why on earth?
sandGorgon 6y ago
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 ? is it because of the synthesizer software makers write very bad code,etc ? i would have thought that a modern iphone 12 pro would be sufficient to run synthesizer libraries
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  The situation is similar to gaming-why work to support a platform that most of your customers don't use?
arnon 6y ago
This is a very badly written article and I'm not sure why it has so many comments and points. There is no real content. No real impact is mentioned. It says they used Mac Minis which they had to reduce the sound quality to use. OK. "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". That's an output. What is the impact then?
- rtx 6y ago
  SM sites with relevant customer base, are sometimes targeted by pr teams.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 6y ago
  It's not an article. It's a personal blog post. The author is conveying personal experience and thinking. It is perfectly well written for that. I found it interesting and informative about a part of the world I don't have experience in. If you don't like it, that's fine. Not everything has to be for you.
  - blymd 6y ago
    Thank you, I'm not sure why some people find the need to be hostile. It was basically some personal thoughts that I decided to share online. Didn't feel like writing 3,000 words on it and definitely never expected to see it shared on HN. Anyway, the post is completely accurate (whether people believe it or not) as I work in the industry.
- S_A_P 6y ago
  Agreed. I outlined my thoughts in a more detailed post but I dont see how M1 changes the game for anyone using Orchestral libraries. SSDs and disk streaming large sample sets multihundred note polyphony has been a thing for 20 years.
  - 6y ago
tomcam 6y ago
Great article, too short. I thought music union rules forbade the use of synthesizers that replaced humans, e.g. horn and string sections.
- blymd 6y ago
  Thanks. I didn't originally write it as something to be shared, but I guess I should from now on. I definitely have a lot more thoughts about it, so might do a follow up in the future. Regarding union rules, synthesizes are fine but there are some "house minimum" requirements so usually there are 2-3 keyboardists and then other acoustic musicians as well.
RoutinePlayer 6y ago
The M1 is also going to cure world hunger and solve global warming
S_A_P 6y ago
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.
- djkoolaide 6y ago
  Broadway can be a whole different beast. These folks run high polyphony instances of software like Omnisphere and that can still be very much CPU bound even on modern x86-64 chips.
  - S_A_P 6y ago
    Thats kinda the point I was making. Hints of large sample libraries which omnisphere is a sort of hybrid sample library and synth. It’s also a large library but it’s not the same as huge multi sample libraries that the article mentions.
dade_ 6y ago
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't replace their rig & 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't care about. Anecdotal: I sold my 2011 MBP to a musician. Best machine I ever owned, but will never buy another Mac.
snicker7 6y ago
> Budget constraints > Mac Minis
eggy 6y ago
Couldn'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/structural work for Broadway. [1] https://extemporelang.github.io/ https://extemporelang.github.io/
- yummypaint 6y ago
  Yes, Im kindof baffled why they insist on a mac mini with such a tight budget. There are linux options too
  - dagmx 6y ago
    Linux is not really an option. There are very few DAWs with support, next to no drivers for common hardware, and next to no support for popular VSTs. Linux is not a good platform for audio work.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      No drivers are needed for "common hardware", because iOS forced most "common hardware" to be driver free i.e. actually compliant with the USB audio standard. It is true that if you're (still) using PCI devices, drivers can be an issue, but there are several high end companies, including RME, with PCI device support on Linux. Ardour, Mixbus, Bitwig and Reaper all run natively on Linux. Yes, that's a tiny subset of those available on proprietary platforms. "Popular VSTs" feels like a wierd thing to say. I would doubt there is enough overlap in people's plugin use to every really create particularly popular ones. There are thousands of plugins available on Linux, both libre, gratis and proprietary. And even if I do not recommend the approach, many (not all) Windows VST plugins can be used on Linux. Yes, you cannot use plugins from companies that choose not support Linux without some hurdle hopping, and yes, that means that "well known" and not-easily replaceable plugins like those from Izotope and Native Instruments are generally out of reach.
turpialito 6y ago
Shill
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
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't work. 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. 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 "early" 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. And now, in 2020/2021, just as when the PPC->Intel shift happened under Jobs, because Apple tells them all to dance, they will. It's sort of pathetic, even if all "understandable" from various points of view.
- rubatuga 6y ago
  Linux audio support is not good. Macs have much better audio support.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    I've been at the heart of Linux audio for more than 20 years. The situation on Linux is not "not good". Most people who comment on it simply don't know what they are talking about. It is fair to say that Macs are easier to get good results with.
    - BostonEnginerd 6y ago
      I’ve found audio in Linux much easier to work with than MacOS in recent years - the Pulseaudio team has done a great job.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      It's an interesting point though.. even if linux can bring you the best but requires 'too much' work for the average audio engineer it's gonna flop I assume. You need balance to survive.
smoldesu 6y ago
If this counts as "deeply interesting", then my cat is a licensed practitioner.
imron 6y ago
> and I’m very excited to see, or hear, what happens. The cynic in me says the sound budget will get cut further.
fmajid 6y ago
The M1 Mac Mini will also run much cooler and be more stable.
- blymd 6y ago
  This is a great point. Heat is always an issue since our Mac minis are always racked up. Depending on the theatre location, it can get quite hot in the pit. We’ve had some computers die in the past from suspected heat issues, so the relative coolness of the M1 Macs is a welcome improvement.

242 points by da02 6y ago

I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. 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't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.

forrestthewoods 6y ago
Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.
- sneak 6y ago
  Ableton Live, the only one used for live performance by any of my circles (admittedly, in the electronic music scene, not Broadway) is cross-platform. Logic Pro is, of course, Mac-only as it's made by Apple. We're not talking about an organization moving to Windows here, we're just talking about a single, appliance-like keyboard-input-to-audio-output computer for someone to play music on in a live Broadway show. TFA writes about buying the machine new for that single purpose. There aren't really "switching costs" in the traditional sense in that circumstance. TBH I think it's just an ad. The circumstance (we have to buy two brand new computers for every run of a show!) and claimed impact are just too contrived. EDIT: Further supporting the idea that it's just an ad, every other post from this domain on HN is promoting a product.
  - blymd 6y ago
    An ad? For what? Don't think too much. It's pretty easy to understand. 1. We use Macs because we need MainStage for these shows. 2. Mac mini fits the form factor. 3. Faster Mac mini means we can do cooler stuff. Easy.
- kabes 6y ago
  I don't know how it was historically. But I got this typical thing where I think more software and gear will make me a better producer and thus I buy almost every big daw, software synth and all plugins I come across and have yet to find the first thing that doesn't run on windows (apart from logic pro obviously)
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    A lot of small-shop semi-DIY VSTs used to be Windows only. That's not so true these days. It's been a while since I found a VST/AU that wasn't at least dual platform. But having run music on Windows for a long time, I would never ever go back. The telemetry, random updates, and general awfulness of the user experience are not something I want in my life. MacOS has issues, not least the breaking changes in Catalina and Big Sur. But when each OS iteration settles down it's generally super-stable and - most importantly for professional use - it doesn't get in the way.
  - blymd 6y ago
    MainStage doesn't run on Windows, and it's the software all the shows use. Even shows that use Ableton Live for playback sometimes use MainStage as a frontend software controller hooked up via IAC.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Most audio software suites were historically dual-OS, or Windows only, for example, Cakewalk, AVID ProTools, and Ableton. Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much inferior to the Windows versions.
  - Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
    There was a lot of Mac-first software too, though - Opcode Vision, for example.
  - cyberdelica 6y ago
    > Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW. I hate to be that guy, but your entire comment is full of wrong. Firstly, Emagic "Logic" started on the Atari and Mac OS platforms. I'm not sure when it appeared on Windows, but it certainly wasn't a Windows first DAW. The Apple versions of Logic were never "very much inferior" to the Windows versions. In fact, it was the other way around. > Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. The fact of the matter is, practically all "audio professionals" of the time period of which you refer, used Apple computers - either for MIDI sequencing, or Digital Audio Workstations. Windows computers weren't even a serious consideration. Those who didn't, still used Ataris, or hardware sequencers/recorders. Pro Tools, originally by Digidesign, was Mac only for years also.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Well, if you want to be technical about the history of hardware and software platforms in Hollywood, it was Atari and Silicon Graphics until the mid-1990s, when most studios switched to a combination of Windows/nix for their needs. Apple was briefly in consideration for DAWs/audio work in the late 80s/early 90s, until Windows DAWs started hitting the market in force. Today, most Hollywood composers use Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first. TV productions favor Studio One, which again, was Windows-first (and from the same developers as Cubase). Pro Tools is industry standard for Hollywood movies...but it didn't become the standard until version 6, running on Windows. Ableton Live, which is the most popular tool for recording live music, was written first on Windows (but originally commercially released simultaneously for Windows and Apple). And Logic on Mac was very much inferior to Logic on Windows, which is why Windows was the preferred platform for running Logic. The Mac version didn't become better than the Windows version until version 6, for which there was no Windows version. While all accounts say that Logic is a great DAW these days, because it's Mac-only, the only production companies that run Logic are ones that are exclusively Mac-based.
cehrlich 6y ago
I don't know about the present state, but certainly 10 years ago you would have had to be out of your mind to use anything but a Mac in an Audio setup that is used for important live performances - the Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  As a former sound engineer I can state for a fact that this is not true. We stopped using Macs while I was still doing it and it was back in like ~98 when we moved for real to digital studios. Depending on what we were doing the only thing the Macs gave us were bigger purchase and support bills. What Apple had going for them was history so people didn't know as much about how to support the setup if it wasn't Macs. The non-Apple software was just fine and the hardware, at the same price point, way better.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    This era was kind of a low point for the Mac. The dying days of both PowerPC and MacOS 9, overpriced underperforming hardware, and the slow painful transition to OS X. Things started to improve after 2006 when Apple switched to Intel.
  - cehrlich 6y ago
    I remember working with some Windows 7 setups and having to deal with stuff like WASAPI Drivers and ASIO4All, having to daisy chain MIDI through the out on synths (which introduced jitter) because there is only one system MIDI in and out, etc. Perhaps there was a way to get these things working smoothly, but on the Mac all this stuff just worked out of the box. My situations were probably edge cases in terms of how much gear was connected to a single computer, but still. I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare. A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".
Reason077 6y ago
> "Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows" Mac Minis are relatively cheap. Not much different in cost to comparable, branded, ultra-small-form-factor PC hardware. (And now, with the M1, I don't think you'll find competitive PC hardware in the same price range and form factor at all)
- mehrdada 6y ago
  I am a huge M1 fan but that statement is almost true, but not quite there yet. I have experimented with a number of prebuilt machines with AMD Ryzen 3600X/3700X, Intel i7-10700, and Apple M1. Those (esp 3700X) are often slightly ahead of M1 (esp in Rosetta) usually at slightly cheaper prices [often discounted too] compared to the base model Mac mini, admittedly at a much higher power consumption, noise, physical size. The delta increases quickly if you have to pay $200 more for only 8GB RAM (which is the max and sometimes the real bottleneck) and overpriced SSD. If you need Rosetta, you are still probably better off with a mid-range Ryzen PC, assuming you're not married to macOS. I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance). I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1. On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    As you say, you're comparing a far higher TDP chip here (Ryzen 3600X/3700X). I don't think those can realistically fit into the Mac Mini's form factor, right? Surely we should be comparing the M1 to the "U" series Ryzen chips?
    - mehrdada 6y ago
      I was comparing M1 to higher TDP chips, yes. If you take TDP into account M1 wins hands down, of course (unless your workload requires more than 16GB RAM). The context of this post is specifically the price-sensitive customer, not a TDP/space-focused one (compare to this[1] for example, once you upgrade RAM and SSD, and install a decent cooler). You also get better I/O in the PC world. [1] https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7814504/HP-Pavilion-TP01-0066-Desktop-PC/ https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7814504/HP-Pavilion-T...
ratww 6y ago
It's the OS. CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one. On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards. There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.

camhart 6y ago

Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64? I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.

mehrdada 6y ago
I ran a multithreaded poker solver (a Windows executable) on top of Wine on Rosetta on base MacBook 13 M1 and it beats the performance of base MacBook Pro 16 inch (Intel 6-core) with Windows running on bare metal by a small margin. (M1 fan actually turned on, which is a rare occurrence; at the same time MacBook Pro 16 Intel would be frying my laps. Ballpark estimates on the internet seem to pin it down beating MBP16 6-core i7 and trailing MBP16 8-core i9 on pure CPU performance benchmarks, power obviously much lower; GPU far better than Intel UHD 630 and close but not quite as good as Radeon 5300M.) For most applications that aren't especially pathological for Rosetta (e.g. V8 x64), it seems not more than 10-30% slower than arm64. (Don't feel too surprised. If your binary is static code, it is pretty much a static compiler from x86 to ARM [albeit an incredibly well executed one], so not magic: in fact if you disable SIP on your system, you can peek into the translated executables in `/var` and look into them via `objdump`/`otool`) -- Another benchmark that is a bit worse for Rosetta: Compiling gRPC from clean source (not quite Apple to Apple comparison cause under Rosetta, it runs LLVM x86 codegen vs LLVM arm64 codegen outside Rosetta and I did not want to mess with the flags). I also feel like process creation under Rosetta can be more expensive, but not sure. - MacBook 16 (i7-9750H, 16GB): 67s - MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB): 48s - MacBook 13 (M1, 8GB, Rosetta): 85s Now I have my Intel Macs to list on Craiglist...
- TheCowboy 6y ago
  What solver are you running? What kind of performance do you get with these setups? I'm curious because I only hear about more core-heavy builds for piosolver. Thanks
  - mehrdada 6y ago
    I tried PioSolver free version with identical settings on all machines and targeted a certain exploitation level and compared the time it took to finish the task. Performance on M1 is close to a desktop 3600X (admittedly weak cooler was installed on that machine)

walterbell 6y ago

> 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. It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.

supernova87a 6y ago
Probably no different from each professional cook in a kitchen bringing his/her own knives to work. Are you going to rely on the crappy "house" equipment that everyone shares and you have no idea what quality it is? I suppose also that a theater has no interest or incentive to keep the equipment top notch, etc. or well-maintained (or is even qualified to do it).
crooked-v 6y ago
Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Mixer and speakers? Yes.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The speakers that sound good for country music don't necessarily work well for hard-core gangster rap. Bigger acts especially prefer to bring all their own gear in order to ensure a consistent sound in every venue.
- forgingahead 6y ago
  This is commonplace in the US, less so elsewhere.
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
Production companies are ephemeral and tour multiple locations. Depending on the production they may require different sorts of equipment to accommodate different performance skills. It's totally unfeasible for a venue to stock a wide enough menu to satisfy a variety of productions, and likewise totally unfeasible for a production that shows up and has mere hours before showtime to adapt to someone else's instrument rigs beyond the basic necessities of PA. You can rent but it's often better to buy as cheap as you can to eliminate complexity and risk.

srockets 6y ago

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)

Razengan 6y ago
I also thought Broadway was some Intel CPU or some console GPU.. oh it's actually the name for an ATI GPU

sleavey 6y ago

> 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. 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'm missing something.

deleted 6y ago
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monocasa 6y ago
They use samples as a base, but do heavy amounts of DSP to get the final product, these days up to simple ML models. Think being able to create new virtual backup singers who you can play like a piano, pretty much on a whim, who sound convincing to the kinds of people who work production on broadway.
gamblor956 6y ago
Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.
- consp 6y ago
  Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    Yup, I am also not understanding the need for it to be a mac mini. The new Apple Silicon chips might be a lot faster. But I am pretty sure that audio plugins take a long time to update.

Nabati 6y ago

> 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. > 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. What will happen is probably that your budget will get reduced, since you don't need as much to deliver the same quality as today.

andy_ppp 6y ago

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

sonotmyname 6y ago
A Kong D1 is just a keyboard- it can’t run Mainstage, store gigs of samples, or run a DAW...
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I know, the point I’m making is (if you read the article) you don’t have to spend $3000+++ on keyboards. The D1 has an amazing action but is still reasonably priced. Used as a midi keyboard with all the things you mentioned it’s fine/designed for exactly this.

robbyt 6y ago

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It'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.) This blog post confuses me, because is he playing the VSTs live? Why not trigger bounced audio instead?

fab1an 6y ago
It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?
- jzwinck 6y ago
  People go to Broadway shows to see live performances, and music is a big part of it (in some shows, the biggest). You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Actually, what is the reason for that? If we had computer-linked humans act a scene, then record all of their interactions, and then have them perform that ten nights in a row as live marionettes replaying their original actions from the computer, is that worse or better? Does the potential for failure and variation attract the audience? Or just the fact that the medium is much higher fidelity: stage actors are human, three dimensional, and no other medium can record all the subtleties of motion and expression just as well.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      It's not the fidelity, it's the human factor. An concert, a play, or any other live performance is much more than a single night, 2 hour performance. It's countless hours of practice, errors, emotional up & downs during the journey. The performance one watches is the tip of the iceberg and the underlying depth is what amazes us as humans. The unmistakable performance or real-time and invisible improvisation during the show. I used to played in a symphony orchestra. Even the slowest of classical pieces is a storm for the orchestra, if not for the spectators.

marcan_42 6y ago

They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/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. That said, 4-5 years down the line when this whole transition is over on macOS, it's going to be great. And for anything not relying on live synth/processing, you don't need many/any plug-ins at all, so that'll work well today. Personally, I'm really looking forward to doing real-time / 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't match ARM embedded systems for real-time stuff, but M1 is from the embedded world). And since it'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.

kevingadd 6y ago
Couldn't you run a VST host in the Rosetta environment for your x86 VSTs and run everything else native in ARM in a separate host? Or does the VST model require that all the VSTs loaded run synchronously within a single process?
- TylerE 6y ago
  It’s within one process. There are ways to bridge it but basically you have a native plugin shim that talks to a process running the target arch and essentially passes protocol messages back and forth. Was common for a while on windows when many plugins were 32bit only and wouldn’t run in a 64 bit host
- ratww 6y ago
  It doesn't require everything to be on the same process, it's just how DAWs are implemented today. There are alternatives, like the bridges mentioned by the sibling post, but it's clunky and manual to setup and slows down your workflow.

mahkoh 6y ago

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'll be able to hear the quality of the M1. And it will only get better with the M2, the M3, and the M4.

hans1729 6y ago
This put a smile on my face, happy holidays
sgt 6y ago
In fact, it'll eventually get so good we'll be the bottleneck. We're gonna need new ears, folks.
- cyberdelica 6y ago
  That just gave me a nice idea. There's probably a market for "audiophile" eardrops, to lubricate the outer ear, such that the sound waves effortlessly glide through the fleshy waveguide, to hit the tympanic membrane at optimum velocity - or something like that.
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    There's far crazier out there. https://englishelectric.uk https://englishelectric.uk
    - dxdm 6y ago
      This is awesome news! Now I only need to find where I can buy some gold-plated Cat-48kHz network cables.
      - layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
        http://www.audiodrom.net/en/special-edition-reviews/104-ethernet-rj-45-cables-shootout http://www.audiodrom.net/en/special-edition-reviews/104-ethe...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

archi42 6y ago

I'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't "normal" computers with Windows/Linux make much more sense anyway? 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).

sgt 6y ago
Windows is a complete mess these days from a usability perspective and even Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about it. As for Linux, rock stable once you get it running (at least the OS itself) but lack of software support and other quirks makes it less desirable on the desktop.
- woah 6y ago
  Rock stable?
  - sgt 6y ago
    Solid as a rock?
kolinko 6y ago
Imagine Windows deciding to do a forced auto-update (or hard disk check) ten minutes before performance. Or breaking down because the system doesn’t work well after the update. I set up a VR performance in a gallery once. It was supposed to run the same piece of a basic program for 3 months. Since it was Windows we had to do additional steps to make sure that it wouldn’t try to update* and possibly break drivers. Because there wasn’t IT staff around to fix things if it broke down. I never had such issues with MacOS. * - additional steps like making sure the built-in wireless is disabled and it doesn’t remember any wifi passwords, so it doesn’t try to fetch any sort of update. Because even if you disable Windows updates, you have a bunch of other drivers that may ignore those settings. And then, if we needed to put anything new on the computer, we had to either use usb-sticks or break the airgap and redo all the testing - so it had to be timed so that we would have at least half a day to fix it if broken.

newintellectual 6y ago

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

sandGorgon 6y ago

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 ? is it because of the synthesizer software makers write very bad code,etc ? i would have thought that a modern iphone 12 pro would be sufficient to run synthesizer libraries

EamonnMR 6y ago
The situation is similar to gaming-why work to support a platform that most of your customers don't use?

arnon 6y ago

This is a very badly written article and I'm not sure why it has so many comments and points. There is no real content. No real impact is mentioned. It says they used Mac Minis which they had to reduce the sound quality to use. OK. "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". That's an output. What is the impact then?

rtx 6y ago
SM sites with relevant customer base, are sometimes targeted by pr teams.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 6y ago
It's not an article. It's a personal blog post. The author is conveying personal experience and thinking. It is perfectly well written for that. I found it interesting and informative about a part of the world I don't have experience in. If you don't like it, that's fine. Not everything has to be for you.
- blymd 6y ago
  Thank you, I'm not sure why some people find the need to be hostile. It was basically some personal thoughts that I decided to share online. Didn't feel like writing 3,000 words on it and definitely never expected to see it shared on HN. Anyway, the post is completely accurate (whether people believe it or not) as I work in the industry.
S_A_P 6y ago
Agreed. I outlined my thoughts in a more detailed post but I dont see how M1 changes the game for anyone using Orchestral libraries. SSDs and disk streaming large sample sets multihundred note polyphony has been a thing for 20 years.
- 6y ago

tomcam 6y ago

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

blymd 6y ago
Thanks. I didn't originally write it as something to be shared, but I guess I should from now on. I definitely have a lot more thoughts about it, so might do a follow up in the future. Regarding union rules, synthesizes are fine but there are some "house minimum" requirements so usually there are 2-3 keyboardists and then other acoustic musicians as well.

RoutinePlayer 6y ago

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

S_A_P 6y ago

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.

djkoolaide 6y ago
Broadway can be a whole different beast. These folks run high polyphony instances of software like Omnisphere and that can still be very much CPU bound even on modern x86-64 chips.
- S_A_P 6y ago
  Thats kinda the point I was making. Hints of large sample libraries which omnisphere is a sort of hybrid sample library and synth. It’s also a large library but it’s not the same as huge multi sample libraries that the article mentions.

dade_ 6y ago

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't replace their rig & 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't care about. Anecdotal: I sold my 2011 MBP to a musician. Best machine I ever owned, but will never buy another Mac.

snicker7 6y ago

> Budget constraints > Mac Minis

eggy 6y ago

Couldn'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/structural work for Broadway. [1] https://extemporelang.github.io/ https://extemporelang.github.io/

yummypaint 6y ago
Yes, Im kindof baffled why they insist on a mac mini with such a tight budget. There are linux options too
- dagmx 6y ago
  Linux is not really an option. There are very few DAWs with support, next to no drivers for common hardware, and next to no support for popular VSTs. Linux is not a good platform for audio work.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    No drivers are needed for "common hardware", because iOS forced most "common hardware" to be driver free i.e. actually compliant with the USB audio standard. It is true that if you're (still) using PCI devices, drivers can be an issue, but there are several high end companies, including RME, with PCI device support on Linux. Ardour, Mixbus, Bitwig and Reaper all run natively on Linux. Yes, that's a tiny subset of those available on proprietary platforms. "Popular VSTs" feels like a wierd thing to say. I would doubt there is enough overlap in people's plugin use to every really create particularly popular ones. There are thousands of plugins available on Linux, both libre, gratis and proprietary. And even if I do not recommend the approach, many (not all) Windows VST plugins can be used on Linux. Yes, you cannot use plugins from companies that choose not support Linux without some hurdle hopping, and yes, that means that "well known" and not-easily replaceable plugins like those from Izotope and Native Instruments are generally out of reach.

turpialito 6y ago

Shill

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

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't work. 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. 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 "early" 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. And now, in 2020/2021, just as when the PPC->Intel shift happened under Jobs, because Apple tells them all to dance, they will. It's sort of pathetic, even if all "understandable" from various points of view.

rubatuga 6y ago
Linux audio support is not good. Macs have much better audio support.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I've been at the heart of Linux audio for more than 20 years. The situation on Linux is not "not good". Most people who comment on it simply don't know what they are talking about. It is fair to say that Macs are easier to get good results with.
  - BostonEnginerd 6y ago
    I’ve found audio in Linux much easier to work with than MacOS in recent years - the Pulseaudio team has done a great job.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    It's an interesting point though.. even if linux can bring you the best but requires 'too much' work for the average audio engineer it's gonna flop I assume. You need balance to survive.

smoldesu 6y ago

If this counts as "deeply interesting", then my cat is a licensed practitioner.

imron 6y ago

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

fmajid 6y ago

The M1 Mac Mini will also run much cooler and be more stable.

blymd 6y ago
This is a great point. Heat is always an issue since our Mac minis are always racked up. Depending on the theatre location, it can get quite hot in the pit. We’ve had some computers die in the past from suspected heat issues, so the relative coolness of the M1 Macs is a welcome improvement.