Thinking about gigging with a Mac... Mini or Macbook Air? M1, Intel?

[Reezekeys]

It has to be this way with the bigger shows - there are lights and pyros timed to do things at musical hit points. And what looks like live playing or singing can be faking to a track as well, even with the bigger acts that have real musicians on stage. It's showbiz folks!

[AnotherScott]

 

5 hours ago, Ibarch said:

I used VST Live...The only real issue is that it puts the songs and parts in a list down the left hand side and scrolling isn't great, the scroll bars are a bit small and finicky for my fat fingers. 

 

That's one of the things about an app being optimized for touch. Scroll bars make sense when you're using a mouse (which these days usually also means a scroll wheel), but on touchscreen, swipe is the better solution. That's a benefit of Jump Desktop... you might be using it to remote-interact with an app that is not touch optimized, but it will make it more touch-friendly, e.g. you can scroll an app that uses scroll bars by using a 2-finger swipe. Which could lead to an odd situation, where VST Live on a Surface Pro might work better if you used Jump Desktop to interact with VST Live from an iPad. 😉

 

Getting back to this...

 

10 hours ago, Ibarch said:

When I started using my Surface Pro I expected that the touch screen would be all I needed but quickly realised that it wasn't. The lack of tactile feedback and the extra concentration needed to hit the right part of the screen with enough accuracy made it too difficult to use for patch changes during songs, adjusting layer volume or muting layers. I soon went back to mapping everything to the keyboard with MIDI. 

When for whatever reason that isn't ideal, as I mentioned, I think good touchscreen patch selection is viable (well, at least as good as it is on a keyboard with touchscreen, since I know some people prefer hard buttons there too), it's a matter of the buttons being large with very readable labels. Here's a setup on an iPad Mini that I used... mostly for the bread-and-butter sounds that get me through 90% of our songs, but what I'm also showing here is I can scroll down to additional patches that are song specific. (The boxes are easily re-orderable, too.)

 

[analogika]

On 3/26/2024 at 6:08 PM, AnotherScott said:

 

 The initial consumer release of OS X was 2001, but yes, there was earlier work. And true, I can't say that there were better options...

 

The decision was final when Apple bought NeXT in 1996. 

 

On 3/26/2024 at 6:08 PM, AnotherScott said:

the initial rollout of OS X was a bumpy ride, and from what I recall, one issue was that Steve preferred the NeXT way of doing things and was at odds with those who were trying to make it more traditionally Mac-like in its user experience (or at least that did not seem to be a priority of his). I guess my issue wasn't so much with it being built on NeXT as with aspects of its implementation.

 

It was ENTIRELY built on NeXT; that was the whole point. It was a major effort to take the NeXT underpinnings and make the user interface look and feel more like Macintosh, not least to be able to integrate existing Macintosh applications seamlessly either as native Classic Mac apps or, with (quote-unquote) "minimal" adaptation, as Carbon applications. 

 

On 3/26/2024 at 6:08 PM, AnotherScott said:

Even just the basics, like forcing understanding of a multi-user environment into a world of largely single users, made it unnecessarily more complicated than its predecessor right there. Eventually, they did change things a bit so that a new user would no longer have to be so "multi-user aware", but my job involved supporting these things back then, and I remember how confusing people could find the new OS, for a number of reasons.

My experience,  as someone who also actively worked in Mac support (and sales) during the transition: 

 

The main difficulties for Legacy Mac Users were a) the loss of the fully spatial Finder (not least because of column view) and b) the introduction of a rigid folder structure on the hard drive, which previously used to be free-for-all, with only the System Folder being taboo. 

Yeah, and we lost tabbed folder along the way (bit of a kludge), and I still occasionally mourn the loss of resource forks and per-file creator codes. 

 

Yes, you had to explain why passwords were necessary and what a network-connected *NIX machine actually meant, but boy, was it worth it. 

 

I don't think Apple actually changed things — more that the world moved on to where it was expected that you would password-protect your computers. There aren't really any classic Mac users around who'd be "new" to OS X at this point. 😉 

The only things Apple really changed was to hide the user's Library folder and eventually lock down the System Library folder. 

[AnotherScott]

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

It was ENTIRELY built on NeXT; that was the whole point. It was a major effort to take the NeXT underpinnings and make the user interface look and feel more like Macintosh

Yes, but to use your example...

 

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

a) the loss of the fully spatial Finder

The NeXT desktop environment was re-worked to make it more Mac-like... but here they stopped short of making it as "mac-like" as it could have been, and the result was something  conceptually more complicated.

 

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

b) the introduction of a rigid folder structure on the hard drive, which previously used to be free-for-all, with only the System Folder being taboo. 

Yup. 

 

This reminds me, back in the System 7 days, Apple distributed a rather large document explaining (IIRC) 30 ways Mac was inherently better/easier than Windows (freedom from things having to be in specified places to work properly was one of them). As it happens, OS X eliminated many, perhaps most of those inherent advantages.

 

As an aside: My biggest personal pet peeve about the OS X Finder is that the information it presents to the user can be wrong! I once threw out a folder because the Finder said it had no content... it turned out it had a ton of content, it just hadn't finished calculating it yet. But instead of displaying an empty field or a question mark or "calculating..." or whatever, the Finder instead happily informed me it had a size of zero (or contained zero items, I forget which). This never happened in OS 9, and I can't believe it's still considered acceptable 20 years later. But this is a digression within a digression. 😉 

 

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

Yes, you had to explain why passwords were necessary

 

For a single user in his home, a password may be nothing but a nuisance. And Apple realizes that... they do provide the option of auto login without asking for one. But IIRC, a new user still had to go through setting up a user and a password, even if all he wanted to do afterwards was bypass it. They could have had a prompt to initially setup for single or multi user, with or without password (keeping in mind that, up to that point, single user without password was the Mac default), instead of adding those complications for those to whom it didn't matter.

 

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

and what a network-connected *NIX machine actually meant, but boy, was it worth it. 

I'm not sure I agree with that. 🙂

 

37 minutes ago, analogika said:

There aren't really any classic Mac users around who'd be "new" to OS X at this point. 😉 

Right... as I said,  "in the end it worked out quite well" (despite some lingering irritations) -- but at the time of its introduction, many found it to be a less than happy transition.

[ElmerJFudd]

I had an Apple IIe, does that make my old? 

[Reezekeys]

18 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

Right... as I said,  "in the end it worked out quite well" (despite some lingering irritations) -- but at the time of its introduction, many found it to be a less than happy transition.

 

Not to mention... no midi support. Even when it was added (10.1? I forgot), most music s/w companies didn't roll out osx versions for a while after that. I remember booting into OS9 a lot with my Titanium 500 G4.

[AnotherScott]

 

On 3/26/2024 at 10:44 AM, Ibarch said:

When I started using my Surface Pro I expected that the touch screen would be all I needed but quickly realised that it wasn't. The lack of tactile feedback and the extra concentration needed to hit the right part of the screen with enough accuracy made it too difficult to use for patch changes during songs, adjusting layer volume or muting layers. I soon went back to mapping everything to the keyboard with MIDI. 

 

I mentioned earlier that, for me, making use of sufficiently large buttons addresses what I need, making it comparable to choosing your patches on the touchscreen of a Kronos/Fantom/Montage etc. - but some people prefer whatever they can do with tactile buttons even then. But there could be an interesting solution there too. I just discovered the Stream Deck series from Elgato, which can give you hard tactile buttons that are still labeled with their functions as on a touchscreen. Models go from 6 to 32 hard buttons, and there's also one with 8 hard buttons and 4 hard knobs which are endless encoders, and can be switched between multiple functions...

 

Cantabile integration

 

Gig Performer integration

 

 

On 3/21/2024 at 12:32 AM, Reezekeys said:

You might measure faster transfer speeds with the Mini's internal SSD compared to a USB 3.1 SSD external on the Macbook - but I also think you're 100% correct that "maybe even the external SSD here is so fast that faster storage won't make a difference (for audio purposes)." 

On 3/21/2024 at 7:33 AM, ElmerJFudd said:

For sure Apple’s soldered on storage is faster than a USB or even Thunderbolt SSD.   But it  doesn’t  matter much for MainStage.  

On 3/23/2024 at 9:45 AM, LarsHarner said:

I do have a external thunderbolt SSD, I am wondering would I still have a seamless experience if I put any libraries on that. 

 

This was an interesting discovery... While I am still considering trying to put everything I need on the Macbook Air M1's internal 256 GB drive, I also found that an external thunderbolt drive is (or at least can be)  just as fast as the internal drive! At least according to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmark. As Reezekeys and Elmer said, for live audio performance, it may not matter. But if you're worried that it might (even if not now, maybe down the road; or maybe if your use for the external goes beyond live audio performance, and you might want to use it for, say, video, or huge DAW projects, or as an alternate boot drive), it seems you can indeed expand with external storage and not lose any performance whatsoever. Here are the MB/s figures I got:

 

Internal SSD: 2696 read, 2259 write

External USB-C (Crucial X9 Pro 4TB): 843 read, 721 write

External thunderbolt: (Fantom 2TB): 2750 read, 2355 write

 

This is on the Macbook Air M1, so its internal 256 GB is already faster than the 256 GB drive is on the M2, which changed the architecture such that you didn't get comparable drive performance unless you went up to 512 GB. Meaning I think it may well be that, on an M2 with its smallest drive, the external TB drive would be noticeably faster than the internal. But I can't test that.

 

The Fantom is about the size of a deck of playing cards, and has some noticeable mass to it, so it feels like you need to take more care of it, whereas the Crucial seems almost impossibly small and light, which gives you the sense that it is more impervious to possible damage. So assuming the Crucial is indeed fast enough for what you need, you still might prefer that one for a gig environment. But I also like the psychological comfort of the Fantom's apparent assurance of zero performance degradation compared to the internal, no matter what I might use it for.

 

[ElmerJFudd]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

 

 

I mentioned earlier that, for me, making use of sufficiently large buttons addresses what I need, making it comparable to choosing your patches on the touchscreen of a Kronos/Fantom/Montage etc. - but some people prefer whatever they can do with tactile buttons even then. But there could be an interesting solution there too. I just discovered the Stream Deck series from Elgato, which can give you hard tactile buttons that are still labeled with their functions as on a touchscreen. Models go from 6 to 32 hard buttons, and there's also one with 8 hard buttons and 4 hard knobs which are endless encoders, and can be switched between multiple functions...

 

Cantabile integration

 

Gig Performer integration

 

 

 

This was an interesting discovery... While I am still considering trying to put everything I need on the Macbook Air M1's internal 256 GB drive, I also found that an external thunderbolt drive is (or at least can be)  just as fast as the internal drive! At least according to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmark. As Reezekeys and Elmer said, for live audio performance, it may not matter. But if you're worried that it might (even if not now, maybe down the road; or maybe if your use for the external goes beyond live audio performance, and you might want to use it for, say, video, or huge DAW projects, or as an alternate boot drive), it seems you can indeed expand with external storage and not lose any performance whatsoever. Here are the MB/s figures I got:

 

Internal SSD: 2696 read, 2259 write

External USB-C (Crucial X9 Pro 4TB): 843 read, 721 write

External thunderbolt: (Fantom 2TB): 2750 read, 2355 write

 

This is on the Macbook Air M1, so its internal 256 GB is already faster than the 256 GB drive is on the M2, which changed the architecture such that you didn't get comparable drive performance unless you went up to 512 GB. Meaning I think it may well be that, on an M2 with its smallest drive, the external TB drive would be noticeably faster than the internal. But I can't test that.

 

The Fantom is about the size of a deck of playing cards, and has some noticeable mass to it, so it feels like you need to take more care of it, whereas the Crucial seems almost impossibly small and light, which gives you the sense that it is more impervious to possible damage. So assuming the Crucial is indeed fast enough for what you need, you still might prefer that one for a gig environment. But I also like the psychological comfort of the Fantom's apparent assurance of zero performance degradation compared to the internal, no matter what I might use it for.

 

TB3 is 40gb per second.

SanDisk PRO-G40 SSD up to 3000MB/s read, up to 2500 MB/sec write

Thunderbolt is not the bottleneck!

 

[D. Gauss]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

 

 

I mentioned earlier that, for me, making use of sufficiently large buttons addresses what I need, making it comparable to choosing your patches on the touchscreen of a Kronos/Fantom/Montage etc. - but some people prefer whatever they can do with tactile buttons even then. But there could be an interesting solution there too. I just discovered the Stream Deck series from Elgato, which can give you hard tactile buttons that are still labeled with their functions as on a touchscreen. Models go from 6 to 32 hard buttons, and there's also one with 8 hard buttons and 4 hard knobs which are endless encoders, and can be switched between multiple functions...

 

What did you use for your IPAD buttons app?  I'm using Midi Designer Pro on an IPAD and it lets you make buttons (and sliders, knobs) as big as you want and send pretty much any command (CC,sysex,etc) you want....for free.  I have the IPAD on a mic stand with a layout i made in Midi Designer.  It sends midi commands over bluetooth to control a Zoom multi-Fx floor stomp box so I don't have to bend over to change/see the parameters. I designed huge, yes-my-eyesight-is-shot, buttons and knobs that let me change patches, turn fx on/off, adjust delay times, verb levels, etc. I love it once you put in the grunt work of making/programming the layout. Can't beat the price either.

 

[AnotherScott]

3 minutes ago, ElmerJFudd said:

TB3 is 40gb per second.

SanDisk PRO-G40 SSD up to 3000MB/s read, up to 2500 MB/sec write

Thunderbolt is not the bottleneck!

Right. The specs on my Fantom drive are over 2800MB/s read and over 2300MB/s write. But the surprise was just how good the real world performance was relative to the internal. I mean, I had been thinking along the lines of what you had said earlier, "For sure Apple’s soldered on storage is faster than a USB or even Thunderbolt SSD." But it turns out that's not the case, when it comes to TB. At least not in my benchmark. In fact, the TB drive was a hair faster than the internal soldered-on storage!

 

9 minutes ago, D. Gauss said:

What did you use for your IPAD buttons app?  I'm using Midi Designer Pro 

I actually used an app called MIDI Macros for that one... I think it was just particularly easy and fast for this one use... the benefit I suppose of not having anything remotely like the flexibility of MDP. The only thing it has is buttons, and the only thing about the layout you can vary is the size of the buttons (globally) and their colors (individually), so it really took almost no time at all to put that together. But the app hasn't been updated in 7 years and appears to have broken with either iOS 16 or 17. So at some point, I'll probably re-do it in MDP. 

[Reezekeys]

2 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

Here are the MB/s figures I got:

 

Internal SSD: 2696 read, 2259 write

External USB-C (Crucial X9 Pro 4TB): 843 read, 721 write

External thunderbolt: (Fantom 2TB): 2750 read, 2355 write

 

Strange: I have the less expensive Crucial X6 2TB drive, which I use for Time Machine backups. I'm getting 928 MB/s read, 945 MB/s write on my M2 MacBook Air.

 

Regardless, any of these speeds are more than fast enough for streaming samples to your Air! Thunderbolt is way overkill for this. Even for video work, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) is fast enough for most folks who aren't pro video editors.

[ElmerJFudd]

35 minutes ago, Reezekeys said:

 

Strange: I have the less expensive Crucial X6 2TB drive, which I use for Time Machine backups. I'm getting 928 MB/s read, 945 MB/s write on my M2 MacBook Air.

 

Regardless, any of these speeds are more than fast enough for streaming samples to your Air! Thunderbolt is way overkill for this. Even for video work, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) is fast enough for most folks who aren't pro video editors.

Is the drive in a TB enclosure or USB 3 enclosure? 

[Reezekeys]

USB3. $80 at Amazon.

 

[D. Gauss]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

I'll probably re-do it in MDP. 

 

 

Yeah, MDP having big spinning knobs or faders (that display the changing numerical value when moved) for changing delay times on the fly without bending down to do it on the pedal was a game changer for me.

[AnotherScott]

4 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

Strange: I have the less expensive Crucial X6 2TB drive, which I use for Time Machine backups. I'm getting 928 MB/s read, 945 MB/s write on my M2 MacBook Air.

Interesting. Micron's own specs are that it's max read speed is 800, and they don't provide a write spec. Meanwhile, the X9 Pro is spec'sd at 1050 read and write. Lots of things can conceivably cause a slow down, so I wasn't shocked to get 20-30% less than their advertised spec (which should represent something in the neighborhood of ideal conditions), but it's weird that you appear to be getting significantly better than the advertised performance!

[Ibarch]

There is a beautiful irony here that bringing data in memory and processor together is a significant reason for the performance increases that have enabled the M powered macs to be able to push data in storage an order of magnitude further away onto an external bus and storage device. 

 

How long till Apple implement a fix to stop this and force users once again to buy their obscenely priced storage upgrades? 

[jazzpiano88]

Yes, Apple is out of their minds.   Their top of the line systems (Pro and Mini Mac's)  come with either 512GB or 1TB SSD Storage and increase exponentially to get more. 

 

It's like McDonald's Coke. 

[AnotherScott]

Yeah, it's an $800 upcharge to bring a Macbook Air from 256 GB to 2TB internal storage. You can get a fast-as-internal 2TB external bus-powered (so still easily portable) drive for $250.

[miden]

coming very late to this topic, been running a MacMini M2 Pro for some time now, in a special holder in a rack. if there is anything that has not been answered, please ask.

 

I use one of two USB-C monitors (both touch screen) a Viewsonic and another smaller unit, depending on circumstance. In the studio its hooked up to a 32" monitor.

 

Re the external SSD the Samsung T7 Shield 1tb drive has been great so far.

[D. Gauss]

3 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

Yeah, it's an $800 upcharge to bring a Macbook Air from 256 GB to 2TB internal storage. You can get a fast-as-internal 2TB external bus-powered (so still easily portable) drive for $250.

 

Meanwhile, 25 bucks for a 256GB SD card that can easily stream 4k video.  Just pop that into your Mac's SD slot and you're good to.... oh wait, Apple, you thieving bastards!  

[AnotherScott]

7 hours ago, D. Gauss said:

Meanwhile, 25 bucks for a 256GB SD card that can easily stream 4k video.  Just pop that into your Mac's SD slot and you're good to.... oh wait, Apple, you thieving bastards!  

 

Macbook Pro has SD slot, only the more minimalist Air does not. (Though you can get comparably cheap USB thumb drives, too.)

 

You can get a cheap adapter if you really need the SD connectivity. (Lots of hubs have SD slots too, and a Macbook Air owner likely wants a hub anyway, at least for their non-travel setup.)

 

Personally, I don't think I've used an SD card since I started taking pix/movies with an iPhone instead of a dedicated camera. 

 

(That said, to get back on topic, streaming a video is not as demanding as live performance of VST sample libraries.)

[Reezekeys]

I bought a hub for my new Air that has an SD card slot, among other things. However, using a card or USB stick to stream samples may not be the best idea. It didn't work for me - one of my very few on-the-gig failures years ago (it was a USB3 stick with more than adequate transfer speeds). I used it instead of an external SSD because it was tiny and I didn't have to deal with a cable - plug it in and go. After it failed I read that flash memory and true SSD memory chips are not always the same.

[D. Gauss]

45 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

 

Macbook Pro has SD slot, only the more minimalist Air does not. (Though you can get comparably cheap USB thumb drives, too.)

 

You can get a cheap adapter if you really need the SD connectivity. (Lots of hubs have SD slots too, and a Macbook Air owner likely wants a hub anyway, at least for their non-travel setup.)

 

Personally, I don't think I've used an SD card since I started taking pix/movies with an iPhone instead of a dedicated camera. 

 

(That said, to get back on topic, streaming a video is not as demanding as live performance of VST sample libraries.)

 

In my experience, as long as you have lotsa RAM (32Gb or more), sample libraries off a high speed SD card or USB stick are fine and dandy. But of course, Apple kills you with their 8GB no way to add a cheap coulpe of 16GB sticks nonsense. Don't know about other programs, but Reaper will put and keep as much stuff as it can in RAM so the storage media rarely needs to be addressed.

[Reezekeys]

What does the amount of ram in the computer have to do with its ability to stream samples off a SD card or USB stick? The very definition of "streaming" means the audio data is playing directly off the card or stick - going through a buffer of course, but that's not comparable to loading samples fully into ram. Until it failed (after a year of use), I was streaming samples from my USB3 stick on my late-2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of ram without an issue.

[D. Gauss]

1 hour ago, Reezekeys said:

What does the amount of ram in the computer have to do with its ability to stream samples off a SD card or USB stick? The very definition of "streaming" means the audio data is playing directly off the card or stick - going through a buffer of course, but that's not comparable to loading samples fully into ram. Until it failed (after a year of use), I was streaming samples from my USB3 stick on my late-2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of ram without an issue.

 

 

just pointing out that more RAM, less chance for any bottlenecks, that's all.  if the app can load the instrument into available RAM, then there's fewer if any calls to the library drive. imo, Reaper makes use of this quite well with big libraries.  e.g. superior drummer 3.