MacOS Big Sur and M1 (Apple Processor) support

[Pasha]

Thanks Josh!

That's Music to my ears (being on a DAW forum)

Well enjoy! 'Music in the Air'

[Tuur]

... Logic is super fast.

I saw a benchmark on YouTube. It's ridiculous.

The guy also said the difference between Air and Pro is almost negligible.

[Sighnotanotherusername]

Big Sur running beautifully on late 2013 6,1 MacPro. Live 10 no issues. Fabfilter, Soundtoys, Spectrasonics, U-He plugins all working perfectly.

My plan is to get another 6 months out of this Mac then move across to an Apple SOC iMac once they are released, the performance of the new silicon looks superb! Lets hope Ableton release an Apple Silicon native ARM version in the next 3-6 months..

[spanktron]

... Logic is super fast.

I saw a benchmark on YouTube. It's ridiculous.

The guy also said the difference between Air and Pro is almost negligible.

I would love to hear a real world , long term experience. I cannot imagine that there will be no difference
cause by the lack of the fan in the Air m1. I need to hear someone say "i used it in a session with 20-30 power hungry plugins and it did not throttle" or something like this.
I would love to buy the Air cause its silent but i am still insecure about the lack of a fan if needed.

Also the 2 port limitation sucks a lot somehow.

[Tuur]

Also the 2 port limitation sucks a lot somehow.

My current Pro has the same setup. No probs here, although I would have preferred one port on the left and one on the right.

[Machinesworking]

I am on an M1 MacBook Air... So it may work with Big Sur, but it doesn't appear to load on M1 apple silicon. I was about to contemplate Soundtoys due to the sale, too... dang...

EDIT: I just read the full comment saying it SHOULD work on Apple Silicon. Let me try again. Will update.

EDIT: ILOK WORKS! I now have Softube Module running. So I assume SoundToys will run, too

Great news! Thanks!
I have a question about those M1 machines : How much free space is left on the SSD? I am afraid that Universal Binary Apps could take more space than Intel ones.
So I can't decide if a 256 SDD will do or better a 512.

Sample libraries are drive killers. Komplete Ultimate alone is at around 800GB these days.
I would never consider buying less than a Terabyte. This stuff adds up quick.

[casegrey]

... Logic is super fast.

I saw a benchmark on YouTube. It's ridiculous.

The guy also said the difference between Air and Pro is almost negligible.

I would love to hear a real world , long term experience. I cannot imagine that there will be no difference
cause by the lack of the fan in the Air m1. I need to hear someone say "i used it in a session with 20-30 power hungry plugins and it did not throttle" or something like this.
I would love to buy the Air cause its silent but i am still insecure about the lack of a fan if needed.

Also the 2 port limitation sucks a lot somehow.

I have been using the Apple Macbook M1 Air since a few days and so far it goes like this:

No Native Instruments support for most or all of the Plugins
Some VSTs seem to use A LOT of CPU (probably due to Rosetta). I maxed our the CPU with about 8 Airwindows VSTs - other VSTs though work fine
The Speed Test that can be found in the forum was that with Live 10 I could use around 55 tracks where I was able to use about DOUBLE that on a 2014 Macbook Pro with i7 2,5Ghz - so not great at the moment where ableton is not optimized for Rosetta.

Other than that a few other things are not working yet like the Google Drive App, ... etc. But the Laptop ALWAYS stays cool and is extremely quick.

It was a bit hard to run VSTs since they where not from a approved developer. But I wrote alittle Batch file that took care of 400 plugins, approving them in one go...

[tilman_hh]

Hello!
Did anyone had the chance at testing maxforlive with the M1, meaning with rosetta2?

Im currently on the fence for a MacBook Air m1, especially the silent operation is tempting. I recently tried a fanless hp elite x2 with a m5-6y54, but cannot really recommend this, especially regarding latencies.

FYI: RME published a beta version of their usb-drivers for ARM/Apple silicon somewhere on their forum and it’s supposed to run quite good...
Greetings!

[spanktron]

No Native Instruments support for most or all of the Plugins
Some VSTs seem to use A LOT of CPU (probably due to Rosetta). I maxed our the CPU with about 8 Airwindows VSTs - other VSTs though work fine
The Speed Test that can be found in the forum was that with Live 10 I could use around 55 tracks where I was able to use about DOUBLE that on a 2014 Macbook Pro with i7 2,5Ghz - so not great at the moment where ableton is not optimized for Rosetta.

Other than that a few other things are not working yet like the Google Drive App, ... etc. But the Laptop ALWAYS stays cool and is extremely quick.

It was a bit hard to run VSTs since they where not from a approved developer. But I wrote alittle Batch file that took care of 400 plugins, approving them in one go...
[/quote]


Thank you for this info as it is exactly my machine (i7 2.5ghz 2014) so now i know it makes no sense to buy the Air m1 for my needs.

I even doubt if it will be that much better-quicker than my i7 when Ableton is optimized for m1 chips. Yes i know it will be quicker
but not as much as i hoped for. Cause the way you describe it if the old one can open 2x instances then the optimized Air m1 will probably just catch up but not surpass it by miles as i hoped for.

Dissapointing as i cant afford a 16 inch m1x

[Tuur]

I even doubt if it will be that much better-quicker than my i7 when Ableton is optimized for m1 chips.

I would be very surprised if that is not the case. 'When' is the more relevant question IMO.

[udolinsky]

Live 10 and Arturia V Collection working fine on my Air M1. But Push 2 dont work. Display stays black, even with PSU attached.

[udolinsky]

I even doubt if it will be that much better-quicker than my i7 when Ableton is optimized for m1 chips.

A YT guy runs 400 instances of Serum in Logic Pro on his M1 …

[danielgrieff]

Hi guys! Just wanted to leave these observations here in case anyone was curious. Also, it'd be interesting to me to read your observations to see if you're experiencing anything like this.

* Across the board, CPU usage is about 15% higher on the M1 than the Intel i9. This is using live 10 and 11. A project which ran at 30% on the i9 now runs at 40-45% on the M1 and suffers constant audio artefacts/dropouts.
* The CPU readings are very erratic on the M1. There's a fluctuation of around 5% that constantly flitters around, compared to the i9 which barely moves.
* On live 11, the per-track performance monitoring doesn't add up to the overall CPU load. 2 tracks with 1 bar of performance impact add up to a 30% CPU load.
*VST vendor makes a huge difference. Valhalla Delay runs basically the same on both laptops. Helix Native is about 20% heavier on the M1's CPU.
*Rosetta apps CPU monitoring in apps seems wildly different to readings from Activity Monitor or iStat Menus. A project running at 40% load in Ableton is only reported as using 17% of the CPU in the monitoring apps.

Of course, I know I'm using unsupported hardware here. I don't expect any different to this, really. I'm echoing what everyone else is saying, when you compare the M1 using Logic Pro to the i9, it's actually more powerful. So while I warn against buying an M1 computer for anyone who needs it to run Live now, there's certainly hope for the future!

[SkullHQX]

Currently it will be difficult to tell beforehand if M1 will work. Everything will depend on the use case, what is used in the project, what third-party plugins, what audio interface, etc.

Also I'm a bit sceptical about cpu performance measurements with third party apps. Better use Apple's own activity monitoring tool for now.

I've just received an M1 MacBook Air to test with. So I'll report back here if my Behringer XR18, Novation SL61 MK3 and Launchpad Pro MK3 even work. Luckily for me I hardly use VST's and my instruments are mainly hardware synths. So that makes things easier. For me Live is a great midi sequencer and mix rack.

@danielgrieff Thanks for your feedback. Can you mention what audio interface you used? That might help people some more.

[Droshik]

Hello friends!
I made a video using the M1 mac mini as an Ableton user, and which of my 3rd party plugins work so far, and which don't.
You can watch it here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9TeShiZ7o
Hopefully this will be helpful and clear up some of the uncertainty for y'all!