The amazing MacBook Air.

[loukash]

3 hours ago, Sascha Franck said:

USB-C-to-B (aka "printer port USB") cables still don't seem to be a regular thing

I bought a bunch of 4 m (!) Delock USB-C-to-B via digitec.ch
Work flawlessly both with the HX Stomp as well as with the Roland OctaCapture. Even though everyone would say that "you must not use 4 m USB cables or The Universe As We Know It™ will collaps in singularity!" ;)
I'm always plugging them in directly, not via the hub. It just works.

[Sascha Franck]

22 minutes ago, loukash said:

I bought a bunch of 4 m (!) Delock USB-C-to-B via digitec.ch

 

Thanks, good to know they work. Might order some.

[fisherking]

so.

i've been doing some of the most complex mixing i've ever done, while travelling (with the air and a pair of iloud micros). all audiofiles (fwiw), with lots of automation, plugins... even a bunch of (gasp!) izotope plugins, and the air has been amazing. no issues at all. it's a great time to be a logic/mac user...

 

[bebenavole]

11 hours ago, fisherking said:

so.

i've been doing some of the most complex mixing i've ever done, while travelling (with the air and a pair of iloud micros). all audiofiles (fwiw), with lots of automation, plugins... even a bunch of (gasp!) izotope plugins, and the air has been amazing. no issues at all. it's a great time to be a logic/mac user...

So would you say that getting a MBPro is an overkill?

[des99]

2 hours ago, bebenavole said:

So would you say that getting a MBPro is an overkill?

Nope. I love mine. If you're just doing some email and surfing tiktok, then sure, it's overkill. If you're actually *doing* anything with it though, you'll benefit from the increased power in many ways.

However, I do think large amounts of RAM (at the prices Apple charge) *is* overkill for many folks. Unless you're regularly doing hybrid cinematic movie scores with templates of five hundred+ tracks of sampled instruments available, 16GB is generally fine (I've not really had any problems, and I do *everything* with my machine), and 32GB gives plenty of room to stretch your legs. Any more than that is, imo, overkill, without a specific use case...

[des99]

On 4/17/2024 at 8:08 PM, Sascha Franck said:

So, after that test I had to take a break to look for my jaw which was somewhere on the floor. I needed it for that big grin...

I know you're a bit late to the Apple silicon game, as we've been talking about this for years now (welcome! It's good here! 🫠), but one of the first things I realised when I got my M1 Pro MBP, was that Apple silicon performed differently to a decade or more of previously held understandings (and I was one of the first to start posting about this).

Previously, on my Intel Mac, I'd generally run a mid, safe-ish but reasonably performant buffer of 128. If I needed something to be lower latency (eg, tracking a guitar through an amp sim), I'd drop it down as low as I could get for that task, but 32 for me with a high plugin load was marginal.

And then, as the project got bigger and we progressed to the mix stage and weren't tracking any more, the buffers would go up to give more performance overhead for large amounts of tracks - 512 or even 1024 etc.

That's the way most people tended to work, depending on their systems.

All of that went out the window with Apple silicon. On these machines, they perform *better* at lower buffer sizes, and actually perform *worse* as you increase the buffer (I did a bunch of tests to verify). This means that for the most part, you can drop the buffer the 32 samples, and then just forget about it - and that's pretty much what I've been doing since.

Good that your e-core worries and that video that confused you that we all dismissed a bunch of times here turned out to not be a problem after all, like we were saying. 😉

Yes, these machines are phenomenal, and my MBP is by far the best computer I've ever had. And the fan has only ever turned on once in the few years I've had it, doing some large render process. And never with Logic. (Due to the power envelope on these machines, and confirmed by Apple, the CPU alone doesn't pull enough power to even bother the fans to turn on, even with all cores maxed. It's really when you hit the CPU *and* the GPU hard, that the fans wake from their long slumber.)

Enjoy! 👍

[fisherking]

3 hours ago, bebenavole said:

So would you say that getting a MBPro is an overkill?

not at all. more power is always more power. just happy i can do my logic work (& some FCP work) on this air...

[Sascha Franck]

1 hour ago, des99 said:

Good that your e-core worries and that video that confused you that we all dismissed a bunch of times here turned out to not be a problem after all, like we were saying.

 

Well, it is kind of a problem, since Reaper seems to be doing better. For the time being, it's pretty much a rather academic issue, though, simply because I will very likely not run into any CPU issues any day soon - and I'd suspect that Apple will fix it at least one day.

 

1 hour ago, des99 said:

Enjoy!

 

Oh, I am!

---

Fwiw... just got a new Motu M2 (needed something as portable as possible) and it's almost phenomenal regarding latency. 3.5ms RTL at 32 samples, 44.1kHz. That's RME league.

Unfortunately, they messed up their driver communication, so it's reporting just 2.5ms - which I couldn't care less about, but these wrong reports always come along with a recording offset. Which I already confirmed, all recordings are 45 samples late. I already adjusted that in Logics audio driver menu, but a decent audio interface should *not* require this (in general, you should only ever use that offset compensation when dealing with converters the interface has no idea of).

Already reported, in case Motu doesn't at least answer, I'll reach for the Gearspace megathread, I guess no interface maker likes being mentioned there for releasing unreliable drivers.

Apart from that, I will keep the M2 regardless of that, at least the offset is stable, so I just need to remember adjusting it in case I'd use another interface (I might not exactly notice, though - 1ms is like 30cm, so there...). Whatever, Motu really got their Hi-Z inputs right as it seems. Compared two DI tracks, looped beforhand, then one recorded through the Motu, one through my Line 6 HX Stomp and was then running both through Helix Native. After a tiny bit of input leveling, I couldn't tell the difference anymore. The feel when playing through the Motu is near to absolutely identical to the patches running in the hardware, too (and as I use them live and for recording since years, I know them pretty well), so that's fantastic. Btw, having a hardware modeler 1:1 compatible (minus the switching options of course) with a plugin is fantastic. And so far there's been no update fees at all (Line 6 just added a bunch of fantastic amps).