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Philip OKeefe

MPN Advisory Board
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About Philip OKeefe

  • Birthday 09/30/1962

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  • homepage
    http://www.ssrstudio.com
  • occupation
    Producer / Engineer / Studio Owner
  • Location
    Southern CA,UNITED STATES

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  1. Parts of Nevada might offer faster ground shipping to the northwest states, but there's always air, and the new Phoenix area Sweetwater warehouse will have Sky Harbor international airport nearby. And as you said, Arizona may provide other benefits from a business standpoint that Sweetwater thinks makes it a better choice for them. Even for the northwest states, I imagine it's going to cut down the shipping times compared to sending something from Indiana.
  2. I've lived in Arizona - it's also capable of getting surprisingly cold in the winter. But from a guitar perspective, it's all academic. They're not going to be shipping any guitars from there. At least that's what they told me. I have spoken to people who have seen the new facility in Fort Wayne, and it's apparently gigantic, and rather impressive. I'm sure the Arizona facility will be pretty nice, too. And if it provides shorter shipping times to west coast folks like me, it's going to help even the paying field (vs. Amazon) for Sweetwater for a lot of potential customers.
  3. A warehouse without any climate control in Arizona might be a less than ideal place to store guitars... but I don't know if the new facility will have climate control or not. It would be a pretty brutal working environment for people without any kind of AC.
  4. Nicely done! That's one of my favorite songs of all time, and the original recording is an absolutely fantastic example of the creative application of available technology (16 track analog) to do something rather unique. The way they recorded that song was brilliant, and the end result is rather spectacular IMO. It still holds up today, even in an era where we have samplers and other tools that would make the production far easier to pull off.
  5. Yes, but it won't be for all of the products that they sell. I was just talking with my Sweetwater Engineer (sales rep) on Friday (I purchased a guitar amp cover online and she called me to say thanks) and she told me about the new facility in Arizona and how it will decrease shipping times. But she said they won't warehouse all product types there - for example, they'll be keeping all the guitars in Indiana so they can continue to do the photos of individual guitars for the website. But for the majority of the products they carry, the new facility will mean those of us on the west coast will no longer have to wait four or five days for them to arrive. In an era where many people have become used to the next day / 2nd day shipping times and near-instant gratification that Amazon Prime and some other vendors now deliver (double entendre intended), I think this is a smart move on Sweetwater's part.
  6. That's certainly possible, Craig. I've heard similar things about the GPU cores for the M1 series; they're the same SoC, but the ones with a bad core or two are utilized for the lower-level product and the "extra" cores are disabled. That probably explains the 7 GPU core versions of the original M1 SoCs. They're just 8 core versions with one bad (or intentionally disabled) GPU core. As I understand it, my M1 Max with 24 GPU cores is the same as the M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, except the eight extra cores are turned off. That way, Apple can still use the SoCs with a couple of "bad" GPU cores and sell them for a lower price instead of having to throw them out. And since the new M2's will almost certainly have higher-end versions (Pro, Max, Ultra, etc.) eventually, it makes sense that they'd do the same thing for that series of SoCs. It seems like a smart idea to me. Certainly more cost-effective than having to toss out stuff with just one bad GPU.
  7. Well, we know what the M2's are now... https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with-breakthrough-performance-and-capabilities/ They're in the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that were just announced today. 8 core SoC with 10 core GPUs. Some enhanced video capabilities, too. Apple is claiming they're 1.4x faster than an M1. There's a new 24 GB RAM option now, too. And remember - the M1 was the baseline SoC, and everything else in the M1 line used that as a building block. I have no doubt Apple will do the same sort of thing with the M2 series. So the upper-end M2 models may very well have even more RAM as an option than the current M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra do. Still no new Mac Pro - I suspect we'll see that in the fall. I imagine the progression of the M2 line will proceed similarly to the M1 lineup. We'll no doubt see M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra models eventually. Probably in a similar cadence to the original M1 line's introduction. What will be interesting to see is whether the next Mac Pro will have an M2 Ultra, or something new that we haven't seen before, like two M2 Ultras connected together - similar to what Apple did when they announced the "dual M1 Max" (M1 Ultra) with the Mac Studio introduction.
  8. I used to pay about $150 for a 2" reel of 3M 996 or Ampex 456, but I had a really good source in Orange County. This would have been in the late 80s and early to mid-90s.
  9. Pro Tools 2022.5 is, unfortunately, still running under Rosetta 2. I know, I know... it's been quite a while since the M1 was first released and Pro Tools is the only major DAW that still doesn't have a native Apple Silicon version. Hopefully they'll have that in their next release... but, who knows? 🤷‍♂️ From what I've read in the release notes over on Avid's website, this release appears to be focused more on bug fixes and less on new features. I don't mind a good bug fix-oriented release if it addresses significant issues or longtime problems, and the aux buss issue that was fixed was significant. There may be other bugs that were impacting performance and that have also been fixed... However, an optimized M1 native version would lead to even further performance improvements for the Mac Studio and all of the rest of the Apple Silicon-equipped computers, too. And Avid really needs to get that happening. Okay, griping over – for now. Back to the aux bus issue that was fixed. Let me start with an example of how the system performs using a reference that is available to all current PT users. Using the previous version of PT, I was able to run the current Pro Tools demo session song (Low Roar) just fine. I was even able to double everything in the session (audio files, tracks, busses, VIs, plugins, etc.) and run that without any issues. However, I started to see errors when I tried to triplicate everything. It started to play back fine, but I started seeing "running out of CPU" error messages about halfway through the song. With the current version of Pro Tools, the Mac Studio is able to play the same session back without any errors or issues. With the session tripled, it adds up to 159 tracks, several busses, a bunch of reverbs, several amp sims, three dozen virtual instruments (36), several channel strips, and various other plugins. Again, while it couldn't get through the song (tripled) using the previous version of PT, it now runs fine. The CPU Total meter in Pro Tools maxes out at 84% at one brief point in the song, but there are zero error messages or any other issues. The response is just as speedy and fluid as when you're running the original, unaltered song. Part of that performance difference/improvement is undoubtedly due to the aux bug issue that has been fixed in PT 2022.5. Basically, aux sends were gobbling up a lot of CPU for some reason, and now they're not. More on that shortly. I want to get the links to the threads over on the DUC so that anyone else who is interested can try opening the sessions and trying things out for themselves.
  10. For Pro Tools users, I definitely recommend updating to the latest version (2022.5), which was just released a few days ago. It fixes a bug that caused excessive CPU use when you used aux busses. I'll post more about the specifics of some tests I've run later tonight, but the latest version results in significant performance improvements over the earlier version of the software in terms of the size of sessions I have been able to run.
  11. Same here. The combination of the two works well for my needs.
  12. There IS a newer macOS version now - 12.4. I am now running it on both of my new Macs with no issues to report.
  13. Was there a trick to getting it to work, despite the error message?
  14. Knock on wood, but so far, mine hasn't had any issues with external drives or other peripherals disconnecting. It seems to charge pretty fast, and has much better battery life than my MacBook Pro does. I am running macOS 12.3.1 Monterey. If there's something newer, I haven't heard about it yet. If there is, unless it's an urgent, highly-recommended security-related update, I'll probably wait a bit before I install it since this OS seems to be pretty darned stable and is approved by Avid for use with Pro Tools 2022.4.
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