Hello friends. I just purchased a mid 2015 MacBook Pro that will primarily be used for music production and DJ gigs. My old machine is a mid 2010 MBP running Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion is very stable and all of my plugins work flawlessly with this OS. My new machine came loaded with Sierra. I'm about to undertake the arduous task of installing all of my plugins as well as Live, Logic Pro, Reason and Traktor on my new machine. My questions to all of you savvy mofos are how stable is Sierra for audio production, do most plugins work well within it and would I be better off installing an older version of OSX before I go through the work of installing all of my plugins? My understanding is that if I wish to go back to an earlier version of OSX, I would have to do a clean install, so I don't want to go through all of that work and then have to wipe it and start again if Sierra sucks. I would appreciate your expertise in this matter.

Cheers!

 

I'm on El Capitan 10.11.6 on a mid 2015 15" macbook pro with 16 go ram and ssd loaded, and everything is totally flawless and fine.
No plugin compatibility problem.

 

i am using sierra. i have ableton live 9 and reason 8. many a plugin too. no problems
i can honestly say i have never understood the osx update bashing. i have never had one single problem with any daw or plugin on any of the osx versions from 10.4 (tiger) all the way to now.
i even have a 2nd machine that i run the os x betas on from day 1. even with those half finished beta OS's i have had virtually no problems. ilok stopped working on one point update of el capitan beta, that's it. but everything else has been fine.

long story short = sierra is fine

 

That's about as convincing as it gets; I shall go forward in confidence. Thanks for your input!

 

Sierra is great

 

The Juce Framework has a bug on ElCapitan which has been fixed in Sierra.
When you turn a knob of certain Plugins , the host DAW's frame rate drops to nearby zero.
This has been fixed under Sierra.

 

Last edited: Dec 26, 2018

Windows 10

 

To be honnest mICROSOFT Windows based mACHINES are great.However there are some annoying bugk here and there,,,But in windows you can find a plenty of VST-s almost everywhere online ....You can exand them and configure as far as you like..i am palning to build a computer by starting with this motherboard Z10PE-D16 WS ...

2 fucking Multicore xeon CPU-S, pcie SSD-s and 64 gigs of DDR4 should be more than enough for anny vst ...]

 

Last edited: Jan 13, 2017

yes we all know about the amazing flexibility and how cost effective building a win machine is!
let's not derail this thread into a win vs mac please!

 

Awesome, but the OP doesn't want to downgrade to Windows.
Sierra is working great for me.

 

I wonder if the JUICE bug is present in the OS-X versions before El Capitan? Probably. Just asking if somebody knows. I'm a OS-X newbie and just having a couple of customers who wish to abandon Windows for OS-X, so I'm assembling Hackintosh computers, too now. It's fun!

Feck Windows 10. I don't want to see or touch that humongous heap of garbage with a 100 feet pole.

 

Last edited: Jan 13, 2017

one day i may pick your brains about hackintoshes...
depends how my bank balance is/apple's pricing/apple's "pro" computer availability in 2 years or so

edit: now i am going off topic!

 

Myself, I have been happy with El Capitan since late-adopting it. That's the thing, though: with each OSX update, it sometimes takes time for third-party developers' software to catch-up with revisions. I had found Mountain Lion to be sluggish (due to bloatware) for Logic Pro X, but Apple streamlined things in Yosemite, and then El Capitan, one which LPX runs better (though it really needs an i7 quad-core processor for multi-threading). Mountain Lion was the first 64-bit-only version of OSX, so maybe it had some kinks to iron-out. I myself keep a partition on my SSD for ML, though, for running software deprecated/left-behind by El Cap. I'm soon going to have a partition (on a bootable external drive) to clone my El Cap installation, then update it to Sierra, to see which software survives the update, or runs better with it. That's the method by which I've managed to navigate OS updates.

 

I use OSX sometimes (stage), but I'm a Win7 peasant. Most of OSX people I know are saying OSX 10.9 (Maverick) is untouchable for music production.

 

Definitely the best choice imo. You got both worlds, with their own pros and cons.

 

I am running ElCapitan 10.11.6 on an old MacPro 2006 with Piker-Alpha Boot EFI solution and it is very stable and responsive.
Even LogicPro 9 and most of my old software and plugins runs smoothly and I rarely have a crash.
If I do, it's more than often related to plug-ins incompatibility which need an update.
I install them one at a time and try my DAW and if there is a problem with a plug-in it shows up pretty quickly.
I tried them all on my way to 10.11 and will never use Maverick 10.9 or Yosemite 10.10 again because of the memory compression feature.
It was very sluggish and I was always out of memory in my DAW and my internet browser...stay away bad Apple implementation.
Oh, and I'm all the way 64 bits now, system, software and plug-ins. No more problems.

 

I'm on the latest version of El Capitan, which got pretty stable there by 10.11.6. I upgraded to Sierra recently, and because TechTools Pro 9 and Quicken weren't quite ready yet, I wound up downgrading back to El Cap for the moment (I'll probably be taking the Sierra plunge again next week!). I didn't see a lot of other compatibility issues. HOWEVER, you upgrading from Mountain Lion may be a concern for authorizing your older software/plugs. The first time I upgraded my OS, it was from Lion to El Capitan, I hadn't bothered to authorize everything first, figuring I'd do it in El Cap. So many plugs and VIs were out of whack, I wound up wiping my drive and starting over from Lion, making sure incompatible software and plugs were removed and that everything else was authorized properly before installing. I didn't have any real problems after that.

I realize you probably don't have the luxury of downgrading, installing and authorizing before moving on to Sierra, and you may not actually even have the problems I did, but it is something you should be aware of.

 

I was on Mavericks OSX and a late 2013 MB Pro and it was very stable, except that I needed a new magic mouse. Version 2 mice don't work in Mavericks, plus I was using Logic Pro X and Pro Tools 11.3.2. I wanted to also use Logic Remote and again Mavericks did not run the version of Logic which could use Logic Remote. I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade. I upgraded to Sierra, with a totally clean install, and reinstalled all my DAW software and Plugins from scratch. Well it was a long road to get everything working again and most plugins and DAWs needed updating to versions which were stable in Sierra. Pro Tools 11 doesn't work so well in Sierra, as it can't import audio via the File menu, you have to drag and drop. Menus and buttons sometimes get screwed up (but restarting the app cures that) and some of the old instruments which come with Pro Tools don't work properly. So eventually I'll need to upgrade to ver 12 but it actually works reasonably well with all the updated plugins and doesn't glitch out or stop suddenly, so it's still usable. As for Logic Pro X it works faultlessly with the latest update which unlike the exorbitant prices Avid charge was free. All the updated plugins work faultlessly including Waves plugins which need Authorisation using an app which comes with the waves installation. The plugins I use include Fabfilter, Soundtoys, Waves, Softube, Slate, Soundtheory, Zynaptic, Soundradix, Izotope, Native Instruments, Lexicon, Eventide, East West, Spectrasonics, UHE, Celemony, flux, Kush, Scuffham amps, Sonnox, Synapse Audio, Sonarworks, Tokyo Dawn Labs, Plugin Alliance (Brainworx, etc), Toontracks, Output and Sugarbytes.

I included the list of plugin manufactturers I use because the VST, AAX and AU versions all work faultlessly in Sierra, if you upgrade to the latest versions. Older versions did not work for some manufacturers, especially the East West Play Engine, which was downright flakey until I upgraded, now it works faultlessly in Sierra with all my sampler libraries.

In terms of stability Sierra is equal to Mavericks with the exception of Pro Tools. In terms of speed, I'd say my computer is now faster by a small margin (Probably because of the clean install), especially with disk operations and streaming from SSDs. Logic Pro X is extremely stable with no crashes since installation.

Tips and Thoughts:
1. Do a fresh install not an update
2. Sierra likes SSDs and gives excellent performance with them. If you install on a mechanical drive I'm not sure if you'll get better performance than Mavericks. Boot times are easily as good as Mavericks and maybe even a little faster. Shutdown time is definitely faster.

3. Turn off Spotlight on external drives, especially mechanical drives. Sierra managed to burn out one of my backup drives by continually using it. The symptom is that you can't eject the drive, and it gets really hot. The drive got very hot and died. Once I turned off Spotlight all was well, the external drives would eject properly. I'm not sure if this is some sort of bug with Sierra or not, but Spotlight is a huge nuisance. If you have Sampler drives which your DAW streams from, definitely shut off Spotlight on those drives so OSX doesn't keep searching them.

4. Update all your Drivers, DAW software and plugin software. I did this with everything except Pro Tools, and it all works well with the updates. Since I don't have the vast amounts of money Avid charges at the moment for an update to ver 12 PT I'll leave PT there and use it when I need it, including bugs.

5. I'm running a thunderbolt SSD drive and audio interface plus USB 3.0 SSD extension drives for data storage and everything works fine under Sierra. I only have a 256GB System drive so I expanded this with a USB 3.0 Samsung T5 SSD using Symbolic Linker which is a nifty free little app which allowed me to move a lot of sample libraries onto the Samsung drive. It worked well under Mavericks and works just as well under Sierra, with R/W speeds of over 400 MB/s on the Samsung on USB 3.0. It's very useful for extending a small system drive and keeping the libraries updatable.

6. I also installed a Mac Fan fan control app which keeps the computer cool, since Apple don't seem to believe you need to use fans when doing GPU/GPU intensive tasks. The fan controller works well with sierra. I had serious issues with my MB Pro about 2 years ago in terms of overheating, just as the warranty expired. It would turn off suddenly, corrupting the SSD. Turned out the heat conduction paste that apple use on the heat sinks had dried up. I replaced it with high quality Arctic Silver and installed the Mac Fan controller app to ensure the computer would not overheat. It gets a dust and fluff clean out once a year and runs well now. No overheating. Apple told me I needed some very costly repairs to get it working again, glad I ignored them.

7. I installed Clean My Mac X on Sierra to keep the computer running as fast as possible. I used the older version 2 on Mavericks. The new version on Sierra is great, and keeps the computer working at optimum speed.

I hope this information helps someone to decide whether to update or not.

 

I have the MBP 2015 top tier model and I just updated to Mojave. I waited a while and it seems all of my legit plugins are working. So it entirely depends, me for example don't use any (32-bit) old stuff so for me Mojave is great atm.

 

If you still have 32-bit plugins, El Capitan is the best choice. If you don't use any, not even Adobe CS6, you can go with High Sierra or Mojave.