analogika

They removed Firewire from the first Macs in 2008 — FIFTEEN years ago. The last MacBook to come with a Firewire port was the 2012 MacBook Pro — which they sold until late 2016 (but only because it was the very last option with an optical drive). The last Mac Pro and iMacs with a Firewire port were discontinued in 2013, the last Mac mini in 2014. We all knew this was coming at least a decade ago — all things considered, Apple have been considerably more gracious than other companies. Among those UAD and others, who discontinued support for their Firewire interfaces in Big Sur, years ago. And managed to make it look like Apple had removed support for Firewire (which they didn't until two years later). Obsolete hardware requires obsolete hardware. Such is the way of the digital world, and has been for four decades. 🤷‍♂️ (Side note: Metric Halo offers the 3d upgrade for ALL existing interfaces, which also replaces the Firewire port with USB-C and Ethernet. My more than twenty-year-old audio interface is running just fine on the M2 MacBook Pro!) BTW, you CAN make Firewire Audio work in Ventura. Scroll down on this link: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/721151

Most controversial vendor is pretty much a tie between inMusic and Behringer.

😄 What do you mean "M1 Mac outperform both the M2 and M3 variants"??? The M2 is 10-15% faster than the M1 at every comparable tier. If you're comparing the high-end M1 Pro (8 P-cores) with the low-end M2 Pro (binned version with 6 performance cores), you've got a finger on the scale. The low-end M1 Pro also had six P-cores and was proportionally slower. What happened with the M3 is that they restructured the CPU lineup, presumably because too few pro users were opting for the high-margin "Max" machines, since the only benefit they offered over the "Pro" CPUs on M1/M2 generations was faster graphics/video performance. This has changed. The M3 Max is still a good bit faster than the M2 Max, let alone the M1 Max, and the same is true for the plain M3 vs. M2 and M1. AFAIK, you can force Logic to use the efficiency cores, but that's not a good idea. The reason Logic defaults to only performance cores is that Logic processes an entire channel strip as a single thread. So a channel strip cannot be spread out among multiple cores (which makes sense, since all plugins and effects can only be processed sequentially, anyway. There's no point in parallelising a plugin and spinning it off to a separate core if it needs to wait for the signal from the previous one). Consequently, forcing the use of efficiency cores increases the likelyhood of overloading one of them (unless Logic actually looks at potential CPU load of every channel strip beforehand and allocates them accordingly, which is probably unrealistic for a number of reasons). Interestingly, Steinberg, which is "up to speed" according to you, is seeing dropouts and performance issues for exactly this reason… https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/8412891538066-Performance-issues-on-Intel-Core-12th-gen-or-newer-hybrid-architecture-CPUs (Windows and Intel-specific, but there you go.) Good question. I think one of the hang-ups here is that what GPUs are really good at is massively parallel processing — which, as implied above, simply isn't what audio is about: unless you've got thousands of parallel tracks, you're still going to be mostly processing sequentially, because that's how audio signal flow works. The potential benefits are slim — things like convolution reverbs — and we're not really near enough our machines' performance limits to make the effort worth it, I think. Perhaps I'm missing something, though.

What is more efficient than a machine that does its job day in and day out, with zero downtime for updating, troubleshooting, or maintenance? That's not where the mainstream market is today, but if those are your core values, Pro Tools is still pretty much unmatched, from what I’m told. They never were a mainstream product despite the bundling of castrated lite versions with prosumer interfaces whose drivers were suddenly never certified for some new OS…

I was going to recommend the iConnectivity AUDIO4c — but for the lack of Auracle for iPad. 😕 The RME may fit the bill. Switching between recent apps on iPad is just a four-finger swipe left or right across the screen, so that might be pretty manageable even during a show…? Worth a try, methinks.

I'm confused. Pro Tools has been notoriously late (and thorough) with certification for new OS releases — for THREE DECADES. This was rarely an issue, because machines running Pro Tools were generally used like the tape machines they replaced: purchased, set up, maintainance only when necessary, and otherwise just used as they were. If that's the value, they're doing just what you state under #1.

So happy to hear that. 🙂✌️

That’s just staving off the inevitable death of the company. The REAL solution is to move on to The Next Big Thing. Profits are secondary unless you don’t really care about the product or the company. Apple milked the iPod, but more than once, they killed the most successful model at its peak to replace it with where they thought the market would follow. Long before the iPod declined, they were working on iPhone. Etc.

There is very likely more music being produced (and released) using analogue synthesisers than at ANY time in history. You're not hearing it, because 60,000+ new tracks a day released on Spotify.

In music production? Maybe. There's probably 10x to 100x the number of actual subtractive analog synths sold each month today vs. their supposed "heyday", though.

Ah, I see. IMO, the Top 40 have become entirely meaningless in the age of instant worldwide distribution and streaming. With 60,000+ tracks released to Spotify every single day, the vast majority of music released in any given month might be fully acoustic and still find zero reference in the "charts".

A bunch of bands are all about that. Not just the overtly "retro" bands.

This sounds weird to me, because this already happened about fifteen years ago, and 25 years ago. It’s just that in the age of total accessibility of everything including virtually the entire back catalogue of the last 100 years, there was so much else going on that you didn’t notice unless you wanted to. But you had to be living under a rock to miss Jack Johnson (only the most well-known of countless artists running a similar program). Or the first few Ed Sheeran albums.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I’m sympathetic towards developers having better things to do supporting multiple platforms and multiple formats, and developing new software, rather than running after the moving target of major OS developer betas. Especially since anyone who actually depends on this software will know not to upgrade mission-critical setups without thorough testing.

I saw Plugin Alliance plugins go unstable with the Ventura upgrade, which wasn’t fixed until about August or so of this year…? I still had to switch early, as an insurance claim saw me replacing my old MacBook with an M2 Pro. Smooth sailing apart from the PA issue.

This makes me queasy. What issues were you seeing that weren’t fixed by simply right-clicking and choosing „Open“?

As I wrote, Apple Silicon is so ridiculously efficient that you’re probably not going to find a way to overload a core with a single channel strip at this point, even if you try really hard. The orchestral stuff is generally sample-based, btw — which takes very, very little CPU, since littlr is computed: it’s just playing and pitching straight audio files, in most cases. It’s heavy on RAM, but not on CPU.

Note that activating all cores in Logic can cause issues: The audio processing within Logic is such that each channel strip is its own thread, and it cannot be split among multiple cores. This has been the case for decades, and when a single channel strip manages to overload a CPU core, the workaround has been to send it to a bus (separate thread) and offload some of the insert plugins to there. Imagine you have a channel strip that runs fine on a performance core but would overload an efficiency core: What happens when the system reassigns threads? Right now, it’s nigh impossible to actually overload an M(x) core with a single channel strip, so it’s a theoretical problem. But at some point, component modelling or some other super resource-intensive plugin tech may.

“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/ Ouch.

😂👍 (I‘m talking about the tech itself, of course, not this particular incarnation)

Wow, that's bad. But just a few months ago, AI image generators couldn't do hands and really messed up limbs, as well. Let's hear it in six months.

That's not a "trend", I think, just a super nerdy fad for a tiny market getting off on the sheer obscurity of it. You can't do the "yeah, I have a favourite band, but I don't think you've ever heard of it" thing in the age of fully digital distribution, so that personality trait has to be filled in a different way.

One aspect of vinyl, as mentioned, is that it is the format whose limitations people had in mind when actually making records up until about forty years ago. So a whole lot of decisions, starting with the very arrangement of instrumentation over choice of gear, up to mixdown and mastering (of course), including sequencing of albums, were made specifically with vinyl reproduction in mind. "Remastering" The Wall made it sound like a mid-90s production. That's well and nice, but it doesn't fucking work, because The Wall is anything but a mid-90s production, neither in concept nor any other decision made in the process of creation. And extending that to today, productions are still made specifically with the medium in mind. Mastering will tailor to the different media to some extent, but "as intended" consumption will make for the best experience, even if the actual fidelity isn't mathematically the most accurate. Obviously, most stuff these days is produced with digital distribution in mind, but not all of it is* — and I still like to buy that on vinyl. And I'm not discounting the frustration of engineers at the time who actually wanted more than the available media had to offer, and who embraced every step towards actual higher fidelity as it happened. *) The Drawbars' One Finger Only, for example, or the stuff we recorded specifically for 7" release on Burning Sole records, as well as the entire Angels of Libra catalog so far.

Ah, Performer on my trusty Mac SE. Cross-graded to Logic Platinum in the late 1990s. Still missing the Chunks feature.

The point of 24 bits, as I understand, is not so much the total dynamic range, but having the detail within the particular range you're using. Not having to hit 0dB digitally (and risk clipping), while still maintaining enough dynamic resolution to have processing freedom and a workable dynamic range, is the goal, no? FWIW, the annoyance of surface noise and crackling are directly related to quality of the turntable and tonearm assembly, beyond the obvious effects of the medium itself.