kcatthedog
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Post by kcatthedog on May 9, 2024 3:01:42 GMT -6
Undoubtedly with Apple releasing new M* versions as quickly as they are the likely rate of ‘programmed’ obsolescence will follow at nearly the same speed. I say “programmed” because Apple’s propensity for denying OS upgrades on older hardware, often only three versions prior to the current, when the hardware is invariably capable of supporting the newer OS’s is simply extortion. Just use open legacy patcher to run uncertified os on older macs: works fine. |
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Post by thehightenor on May 9, 2024 4:30:38 GMT -6
My Intel 4950 (six core) latest me 9 years. My new 13900K (24 core) will last me at least another 9 years. One new system per decade is all I need. It’s very expensive to stay on the cutting edge. Maybe, I bought a used m1 mini with extended renewable warranty, Magic Trackpad and keyboard and a 34 inch curved monitor for $1100 cdn, like $800 usd. Agreed, buying new isn’t cheap, but there are Apple refurbished, like Ragan’s new air and the used market, so there are options. Like said above too, how much more power for audio, do you need than say an m2 studio? Exactly correct, modern computers are crazy powerful. My old system could manage about 25 instances at 32 buffer size of the Sam Sigalas Cubase benchmark, and my old system almost has enough power for my needs even after 9 years of use. I started testing my new 13900K 24 core system and gave up when I got to over 100 instances! I just though this is crazy, unless I decide to start doing 80 piece orchestral movie scores mock-ups I’m set for a while for my singer songwriter compositions  |
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Post by OtisGreying on May 9, 2024 4:39:40 GMT -6
It's amazing how a Mac Mini M2 on education store goes for 500$ and an upgrade from 256gb SSD to 512gb SSD is 200$ more bringing it to 700$. So 256gb of SSD space is worth nearly 50% of the actual computer price tag.... In any case I've bought 2 Mac mini's each at 500$ a pop w/ 256gb SSD, one is a slave computer, other is my main computer for mixing. I think the mac mini 256gb is a very good deal IMO. Use external SSD's. M2 chip on the cheap.
Edit: Looking at my mac's storage looks like the dreaded "System Data" is coming to get me. 115 gb out of my 256 is taken up by it. Apple gets the award for most confusing, unaddressed and inconvenient computer bug. Perhaps its intentional to incentivize the SSD purchases.
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Post by Dan on May 9, 2024 7:04:22 GMT -6
Apple jacks up the price and forces you to buy it. You need a 1 tb to 2 tb ssd and to max out the ram of your main computer. 1tb just for programs and os. 2 tb if you don’t want an external tbolt array for your audio. it’s common to have sample drives, audio drives, and a backup hdd (inherently more reliable long term than ssds but noisier) or five.
Dan
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Post by svart on May 9, 2024 7:13:56 GMT -6
I just upgraded my work computer from 256GB to 512GB because I couldn't install the 25GB that Visual Studio required..
I bought a nice WD NVME SSD for 50$ on Amazon and had it delivered the next morning. I popped it into my external USB/NVME case and cloned the existing drive in about 10 minutes and then popped the new drive in and got back to work.
Man I love PCs.
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Post by Dan on May 9, 2024 7:33:36 GMT -6
Maybe, I bought a used m1 mini with extended renewable warranty, Magic Trackpad and keyboard and a 34 inch curved monitor for $1100 cdn, like $800 usd. Agreed, buying new isn’t cheap, but there are Apple refurbished, like Ragan’s new air and the used market, so there are options. Like said above too, how much more power for audio, do you need than say an m2 studio? Exactly correct, modern computers are crazy powerful. My old system could manage about 25 instances at 32 buffer size of the Sam Sigalas Cubase benchmark, and my old system almost has enough power for my needs even after 9 years of use. I started testing my new 13900K 24 core system and gave up when I got to over 100 instances! I just though this is crazy, unless I decide to start doing 80 piece orchestral movie scores mock-ups I’m set for a while for my singer songwriter compositions The 12900k and 13900k can be brought to their knees by amp sims and newer fx. So can the m2 and m3. Stack up di -> any distortion plug imaginable that can be used as a pedal -> amp sim on highest quality -> ir -> maybe blend in minute amount of room verb -> fake pre -> parametric eq -> dynamic eq -> cool eq -> tape plug to take the top off. Do this repeatedly and the computer runs out gas. Especially for punched in leads or modified vsti sample packs. Reaper and Logic will keep going until they run out of the real cores and the effiency cores will just start freezing up or stuttering when a core gets overloaded. Cubase’s audio engine engine will crap out before the cpus. Pro Tools can be hit or miss. Also using naively upsampled plugins like Pulsar 1178, mu, and DMG Trackcomp2 at higher oversampling rates where they often don’t sound like crap (I think everything but the 2500 and the zener in track comp sounds pretty much like a dysfunctional digital processor and that the pulsar 1178 is good but the mu is wtf at times) will take way more cpu versus multirate plugins that only upsample certain functions (Weiss, tdr, goodhertz, modern eventide / newfangled, tone projects) I believe many waves plugs), use anti-derivative functions (chow, apulsoft, newfangled), and have other ways to reduce distortion (tdr, Sony / Sonnox, Waves Ren, Weiss, u-he,lhi, ni, klanghelm, cytomic, mdw). Many of these programmers are very clever and have written functions and algorithms that are insanely low distortion or that minimize distortion based on how they are coded down to basic filters written for lower distortion at the cost of an additional cpu cycle or two. Tdr’s rectifiers in the side chains of their dynamics processors are something else. The sound radix powair varies the amount of lookahead, that is attack smoothing by the frequency that it is compressing! The MDWDRC2 vs a standard rms vca type compressor can only be made to distort by doing stupid stuff like insanely fast secondary or tertiary releases on bassy content. Like there’s a good debate over the crane song song phoenix II gear space with people saying oh it’s so much better than modern distortion plugs. There is no way on god’s green earth that it is true. You have to leave it on subtle settings or otherwise it sounds like crap from digital artifacts. Meanwhile you can push decapitator right up into the red and the fuse plugins far past the red before they break up from digital artifacts because they are better coded or leave them to do barely anything. You can set u-he satin, goodhertz tupe, and chow tape to stunt settings where a real machine would break down or need constant realignment and push them far into distortion. Computers are now very powerful and it’s all in how you use them. We are a couple generations away from being able to reamp an entire orchestra but it will come hopefully not before skynet and streaming ruin the industry even more. Dan |
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Post by rowmat on May 9, 2024 7:36:56 GMT -6
Undoubtedly with Apple releasing new M* versions as quickly as they are the likely rate of ‘programmed’ obsolescence will follow at nearly the same speed. I say “programmed” because Apple’s propensity for denying OS upgrades on older hardware, often only three versions prior to the current, when the hardware is invariably capable of supporting the newer OS’s is simply extortion. Just use open legacy patcher to run uncertified os on older macs: works fine. Yep know it and I’m running this already on my mid 2012 MBP with Ventura. It allowed me to run the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. However this now 12YO MBP is indeed struggling due to its age and with more AI related apps requiring a lot more horsepower. A mid spec’d 14” MBP here in Oz is pushing $7K AUD. I paid around $4400 AUD for my 15” MBP Retina in 2012. I’m looking at an M3 MBP or maybe an M4 depending on how far away the release date is. While Opencore Legacy Patcher has been a get out of Apple jail for many it just highlights my point that Apple are acting in bad faith when it comes to prematurely obsoleting their hardware typically beyond the third or fourth OS upgrade. |
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kcatthedog
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Post by kcatthedog on May 9, 2024 7:46:19 GMT -6
I see used studios here locally for around $2,000 cdn, if you wanted to grab one let me know, could ship etc..
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Post by rowmat on May 9, 2024 9:01:05 GMT -6
I see used studios here locally for around $2,000 cdn, if you wanted to grab one let me know, could ship etc.. Thanks for the offer but I def need a MB for the portability and I’ll have to buy it locally for warranty etc. Not as much DAW stuff these days but more photography related and maybe some 4K video. The later versions of Adobe PS and LR are often crashing my old MBP and it doesn’t have enough GPU RAM for many tasks so there’s that. Opencore got me by for about 12 months but since the last couple of Adobe updates I’ve hit quicksand due to hardware limitations. |
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Post by the other mark williams on May 9, 2024 11:50:26 GMT -6
I know I sound like a broken record around here saying this, but seriously, chip speed and higher number of cores CANNOT come fast enough in the video world. The video advancements that are just barely now becoming possible are because of the increased CPU from the latest chips. Even if chips QUINTUPLED in speed/power in the next year (they won't) it still wouldn’t be fast enough for what we need RIGHT NOW in the video world. try working on a PC....Plenty of speed there. I don't have anything against PCs on principle - I just like Macs more. They bring me more joy. I was a PC guy from probably 1987-2001. I switched over to Macs for audio work first, and gradually for everything else, too. So I have certain life associations with PC use. For the foreseeable future, I'll be sticking with Macs.
But even in PC-land, some of the AI masks and subject/detail removal that are finally becoming possible really will change the state of the industry over the next 2-3 years. And if that industry has more CPU/GPU, it will eat it up in no time. (I know you already know this... ) |
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kcatthedog
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Post by kcatthedog on May 9, 2024 12:52:56 GMT -6
Peeps should just use the platform they prefer. My 2 macs have basically just worked for 14 years and counting and I think my m1 mini will serve me just fine for many more years. I can renew the warranty for around $50 cdn annually and this continues my phone support as well. I understand the challenge of running systems to failure to see how powerful they are, but then there’s your own real world use case: maybe one day soon, my m1 fans will come on? |
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Post by Blackdawg on May 9, 2024 15:46:17 GMT -6
try working on a PC....Plenty of speed there. I don't have anything against PCs on principle - I just like Macs more. They bring me more joy. I was a PC guy from probably 1987-2001. I switched over to Macs for audio work first, and gradually for everything else, too. So I have certain life associations with PC use. For the foreseeable future, I'll be sticking with Macs.
But even in PC-land, some of the AI masks and subject/detail removal that are finally becoming possible really will change the state of the industry over the next 2-3 years. And if that industry has more CPU/GPU, it will eat it up in no time. (I know you already know this... ) yeah the AI stuff is resource sucking. But you can have a hell of a lot more resources available on a PC vs a Mac. Performance per watt, no question Mac is winning. Overall shear horse power, PC is still king. You could mount 3 4090s in a PC and a threadripper and crush just about anything you'd ever want to render....of course be expensive both in hardware and your power bill lol |
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Post by Dan on May 10, 2024 9:41:51 GMT -6
I don't have anything against PCs on principle - I just like Macs more. They bring me more joy. I was a PC guy from probably 1987-2001. I switched over to Macs for audio work first, and gradually for everything else, too. So I have certain life associations with PC use. For the foreseeable future, I'll be sticking with Macs.
But even in PC-land, some of the AI masks and subject/detail removal that are finally becoming possible really will change the state of the industry over the next 2-3 years. And if that industry has more CPU/GPU, it will eat it up in no time. (I know you already know this... ) yeah the AI stuff is resource sucking. But you can have a hell of a lot more resources available on a PC vs a Mac. Performance per watt, no question Mac is winning. Overall shear horse power, PC is still king. You could mount 3 4090s in a PC and a threadripper and crush just about anything you'd ever want to render....of course be expensive both in hardware and your power bill lol The pcs are far more powerful where it counts: single core performance. Modern intel and amd are good but intel favors purchasing the best processor with the atx case, cooling, and power supply to run it. A pimped out Mac mini has a far lower buy in and is 75% as good for audio, losing out only really for heavy amp sim and sample projects and needing an owc chassis for sample libraries. If you record clean and don’t do any bullshit, a Mac mini is just as good. Unfortunately most of us have to deal with bullshit recordings, samples, DIs, and performances… ugh 😣 and we have almost every distortion plug that goes on sale to hide it. Yes I’ve used vintage warmer, decapitator, tupe, the fuse plugs, radiator, satin, all recently to hide poor recordings. |
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