We can stick a Nerf softball on a mic for 200$ and act like we are at the big studio. You know, the one with no isolation booth. Someone's 15 YT subscribers might hear the fan over the 100W monitors.

 

Last edited: Jul 4, 2023

I really just googled M1 or M2 throttle issues and pick any poison that were listed. Listened to a few Youtube videos testing on benchmark as well. I run a i7-11800H on my laptop which is very close in performance to the M1 pro in benchmarks and I do hit the wall if I'm not careful enough so to believe that the M1 pro wont crap and throttle if I plan on an ''upgrade'' for my already used Laptop is a bit of a stretch even if I know that mac is more user friendly in this regards...I mean, it really use to be a lot. Not as much nowadays. But I run big sessions and I'm not a fan of bouncing so I usually run my tracking ( when in south america) from my mixing session. It can get out of hand real quick. For that reason I am not convinced of an M1 Pro being a substential upgrade given the throttling issues reported.

Now the OP might not have the same ressource need as I have and I can totally conceive that but If I have to put 2000$ on a Macbook or 2000$ on a i9 13980HX laptop, toi me the choice comes down to ''fan noise'' vs ''Cpu craping on me''. Of course, on both side its an exaggeration as I would most likely track from a 2 track in the same room and would probably never use the same Track, mix or master session for the same track on a Mac neither but to me, that's the big picture.

That's just my point of view and someone else perspective can be just as valid. I know I feel confident enough with my experience with different machine not to feel the need to bicker with others on the subject.(not saying that you do neither)

Edit: A benchmark difference between the 3 cpu I am comparing here.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...00-MHz-vs-Intel-i7-11800H-vs-Intel-i9-13980HX

 

Last edited: Jul 4, 2023

Very cute.

Sending you a huge hug.

Hope you'll get more hands on experience in the near future with what Kaotica Eyeball can do to help a touring artist.

 

Until recently I had a strong aversion towards anything Apple. However, they really changed the game with Apple Silicon.

On one hand, Intel/AMD seem to be hitting the ceiling in terms of performance vs power consumption with their existing architectures. I switched to Macs because I just couldn't find a decent quiet PC laptop. They seem to be either under powered or roaring room heaters with a shiny display. And it's the PC laptop side where you can expect all kinds of problems to develop over time due to overheating, including CPU throttling.

It's a deadly combo of a new generation of CPUs, with a significant increase, under heavy load, in power consumption/heat compared to the previous generation, crammed in just as small/thin enclosures, or even thinner, with the manufacturers having neither time to develop nor space to cram more efficient ventillation systems.

On the other hand, the M1/M2 family of processors is a quantum leap in terms of efficiency. They consume 15-20W, a fraction of the Intel/AMD equivalents in terms of CPU power. All of the models, apart from the Air, have a fan or two and the fans sit idle most of the time because there's nothing for them to do, except when it comes to the heaviest tasks like video rendering. You certainly don't hear them when rendering audio.

I really don't know where you found that info about M1/M2 throttling and how you interpreted it, but in real life, especially in music production, it's a non-existent issue. This is not about points of view and perspectives. It's as scientific as it gets, easily proven in practice. There are dozens of you tube videos with people pushing M1/M2 Macs to the limits in terms of channel and plugin count and ending up equally fascinated and amused with the way these machines behave when pushed hard. I have done it too, it's a lot of fun. Do yourself a favour and try it for yourself.

 

Not gonna lie, the only reason I wanted to go Macbook is for the silent side of it so I'm with you here. For the performance, I think that new i9 has a serious edge now. I'm not sure when was the last time you switched from PC to Mac but I know that about 5 years ago, my laptop fan was pretty noisy even when idle. Nowadays, they introduced some sort of app that let you control your fan. If you're dumb enough, you leave it at low speed and fry your cpu in a year or 2 but I don't do that. As for the videos of people showing their Macbook air throttle, it's as simple as going on youtube and typing ''M1 Throttle'' and you'll get a few videos.

We could do a test on both our machine and post the specs of our respective laptop and see how it goes. Based on the benchmark we could then easily make an assumption on the capacity of this new i9 13980HX and see how much of a performance difference it makes. I know my cpu is rated at about half the cpu power of that new i9 cpu. I'm pretty sure it wont run twice as much load in terms of audio production but it could still give us an idea. It wouldn't be very scientific but it would still give us something to compare the performance on. You don't have Studio one 6 installed on your Mac by any chance ? I personally have everything to win here as I definitely prefer to know how much off I am then assuming based on people loving their OS company. In other words, I don't have a horse in this race and couldn't care less if Mac or PC is better. On the other end, I will be able to make a far more advisable choice by knowing the real life performance comprison between the two and making my own assumption based on the new i9 benchmark.

 

Macbook Air is the cheapest Apple laptop. You were referring to the M1 Pro and that one only comes in the Macbook Pro 14" and 16". And even Macbook Air can't be pushed to throttle just like that. I'll have to search for those videos. I've seen many in which the Air fared just as well as any other M1 Mac, in terms of track and plugin count.

Anyway, would it be OK for you to install Reaper? It's lighter and more CPU efficient than Studio One. Furthermore, it's legal to download and evaluate for a period of time and we can be sure that we are using exactly the same version (currently v6.81).

BTW, I just had a Lenovo laptop with the i5-12500 CPU (12c/20t), similar benchmark score as your i7, over 20000. It couldn't compete with the M1, but it could with our washing machine.

Also, I don't have a Macbook, but the M1 iMac is very similar performance-wise to the M1 Air.

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2023

When you have to compare a machine you don't even own, with one you have never even used; you know exactly what is going to happen.

Maybe you can do this "test" in Fantasyland. Why not bake in something like "this one I don't even own is 2X faster than the one I can test" while you are at it? oh. Ok, it's only 50% faster, but we can still act like they are the same price, right? Let's just use this i9 Alienware that is 4000$ to benchmark against a m1 Air.

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2023

I can definitely install reaper.

We can try the single core load and a full load with a few different plugins across multiple channels.

We could then make a direct comparison based on the single cpu benchmark and multi cpu benchmark for each cpu.

As I said, it's nothing scientific but at least it will help us understand the performance differance between your mac ( which mac by the way and which cpu? ) and PC.

Do you have the fabfilter suite ? I could send you a few randomly made presets so we use the same settings to test. Or if you have a different idea, Im up for it.

Maybe the stock plugins in reaper could work as well...

Not sure how you wanted to try it but here's a try.



If I add more it start to stutter when I hit play.

24/96 at 4096 buffer size.

I just put a random midi sequence on Reasynth and added readelay as an effect.
I'm at 972 tracks and it can play but if I add another 50 it start to stutter every 3-4 seconds.

I'm not sure why it can only take 50% cpu on idle but when I hit play it goes up to 72% and the stutter occur at bout 77% cpu every 3-4 seconds.

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2023

Seems to be your favourite place for sure.

Talking of which, It's time for you to go to bed kid. No more trolling on the internet for tonight or the monsters under your bed will eat your toes.

The i9 13980HX i linked in this thread is 1800$.

Fantasy land you said huh?

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2023

That's fine.

I now have a 2021 M1 iMac, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 8/512 GB. Before that I had a M1 Mac mini, 16/512 GB. So, not the cheapest, base models, but not more powerful CPU-wise than base models either.

I don't have Fabfilter anything. Stock plugins in Reaper are fine, but it would take hundreds of them, they are very light. I suggest we make it easily reproducible and use freebees that don't require special installers, something like Tokyo Dawn Labs (Kotelnikov, Molotok, Nova, VOS Slick EQ), Valhalla Supermassive for reverbs. We could combine that with some free synths (Vital, Odin2, Podolski, TyrellN6 etc.) or do a separate VSTi test.

I'm going to sleep now, it's quite late here.

 

For this reason especially, I recommend you get the new MacBook Pro. You don't know when you can afford to upgrade again and you want something high quality and versatile. The mac is that. I have Macs and PCs and I can tell you that PC laptops don't offer much over a Mac besides more warez....but too much warez makes you unproductive too. The essential stuff you need are already available (Arturia, Synlenth, Kontakt, Ableton, Bitiwg, etc so don't be greedy). To be fair, a PC desktop has the advantage of Nvidia cards, and PC laptops can get ram/storage upgrades. BUT If you can afford to get M2 Mac with 1TB of storage and minimum 16GB ram, you will be fine for a long time with music, graphics design, video editing, etc.

The Mac's battery life, THE SLEEP FUNCTION (Most PC laptops have insomnia!), and reduced heat are significant advantages to your everyday use. If you decide to learn to code or use for work, you'll realize the MacOS advantages within the filesystem and hotkeys.


Get the mac and don't look back!

 

Depending on the price point, you can make a 500gb ssd system disk work easily. The upgrades are where things get expensive a little faster than you would expect. 1TB is likely not big enough to avoid buying an external usb storage drive. Their RAM pricing for 8gb additional ram is quite a bit of money, but I think it is an important upgrade for audio. Many people say they are good with 8gb; but you do not get a chance to go back and change your mind if/when the time comes you need it.

You got Sylenth working on a Apple Silicon?

 

For sure 8gb ram is not enough for long term use as the OP said this is a major investment and he doesn't know when he'll be able to buy a new unit. As apps get instealled over time, they often come with background services that will eat the ram...even Native instruments has services and daemons that can eat up to 500mb of ram at any time it deems, even when not using music software. 16GB minimum.

As for storage, 512 is cutting is close. Per SSD best practices, you should strive keep at least 100gB free on your system drive. If you install apps like logic and adobe suite, they can take massive space with full features. Logic Pro full suite is like 80GB. Adobe full suite is about 40GB. You'll have many things on external, like Kontakt libraries, but think about future proof. My iCloud photo library is 40 GB by itself. Do some assessment of your current data use.

 

Hi @Strivingtolive,

Firstly, since you're here, you probably know the sister warez site. If you search macos warez, and comment queries you'll get input fairly quickly, so using cracked plugins on mac should not be such an issue if you take the time to just read comments.

Secondly, there are many free plugins and sound design synths - you should checkout bedroomproducerblog for those. They usually work on both Mac and PC.

Thirdly and actually why I write this, the experience on Macbook is like no other. You will love it from opening the lid to shutting it down everytime, and once you get a feel of the gestures you'll be intuitively creative. This I'm saying from my personal experience. I have powerful Hackintoshes, and a Macbook Air 2017 but I work faster on my slow Macbook because (I guess) I interact with it more personally and also Ableton is actually super snappy on it.

Plugins that you really need to buy, just wait for Black Friday sale or bedroomproducerblog.

So I'd recommend not a maxed out Macbook Pro M1 or M2, 16GB ram and 512GB SSD (minimum). Save money on laptop expense and just buy the plugins you can't find on the sister site on Black Friday.

Hope this helps in some way . Have a nice day, I know this decision is really bothersome -- too many options, so good luck!

Cheers!

 

What's the constructive part in this?

 

Guys, I hope that this thread is not going to the useless Mac be Pc war.

Let's be constructive and objective. Remember that we have a member who is looking for good advices to decide where to put his hard earned money.

 

A lot of times this is because of braindead cooling and power settings in either the BIOS or system software. You would be shocked at how quiet a laptop can be if tweaked properly. In "gaming" laptops it is usually set for maximum performance + maximum cooling, so even if the CPU is doing practically nothing the fan still spins up. I always delete as much of the custom software and drivers as possible and install the generic drivers from Intel, etc. Another cause is CPU spikes, which fools the system software into thinking the CPU is doing more work than it really is. Gaming GPUs will cause fans to spin even more than CPUs, so you could try to undervolt, or reduce the max power consumption and speed. You could try turning the GPU off entirely and switch to the onboard Intel GPU, which runs much cooler, depends if your BIOS supports it or not.

 

Worst enemy of an audio-orientated laptop :

DPC LATENCY

It causes audio clicks and lags, most of the time caused by thermal system.

On PC try avoiding gaming-dedicaced GPU card (nvidia GTX/RTX...), most of the time you'll need to disable them in order to have glitch-free realtime audio.

 

I'm not a Mac fan, don't really like MacOS and, FWIW, vastly prefer Linux, including for music production.

This is how the 2021 M1 iMac I'm currently using performed using Reaper v6.81 under Ventura 13.4.

New MIDI item, 2 bars long, duplicated to the total length of 64 bars, just over 2 minutes.

A four note chord sustained over the full length of two bars: C3 49, E3 52, G3 55, B3 59. All notes played with the same velocity: 127, tempo 120.

Plugins: ReaControlMIDI, ReaSynth, ReaDelay, untouched, all default presets

24 bit/96 kHz, buffer setting 4096. The attached screenshot shows the performance using the iMac onboard audio (Headphones Out). I later repeated the test with the SSL 2 and got practically the same result.

1200 tracks played smoothly. Past that, towards 1250 tracks, it still plays smoothly and is responsive, but I get crackles (xruns) when I move the mouse (Bluetooth).

I did hear the fan, for the first time. It would kick in after half a minute of playback.

The xruns reported in the Performance Meter occured while opening the Screenshot app.

 

Last edited: Jul 5, 2023

So for about the same benchmark result, we can conclude that my i7-11800H is not as efficient as your M1 (pro?) cpu. You get about a 20% increase in usefulness on top of mine. My fan also did kick in at about 600 instance but not full speed. It really got all the way up when I played it for a minute at past 900 instances but I still had quite a bit of headroom on my cpu. It was just the audio that was cracking and I cannot explain why. I was using my Universal Audio Thunderbolt audio by the way. Forgot to mention that.

I also see in your screenshot that your CPU run at 97% and is in the red. Mine was not peaking but still I was hearing the audio crackle at about 77%. Maybe an optimization I forgot to change. I must say that I don't use reaper so I don't know about the config. Still, I believe the test make sense in my perspective. As I said before, I was expecting a Mac to be more efficient but I didn't know by how much given the benchmark we see on the usual website. I know that 7 years ago, the difference was much bigger in term of processing capacity when we were talking about a PC build and a Mac.

The stability of the whole system of a Mac is also a big winning point here. There are many users that have drivers issue on Windows. Fortunately, I don't.

Now, would it be safe to say that the i9-13980HX would grant a far greater audio processing power capacity then both our cpu? I would tend to believe so. As I said before, my cpu rank at about half the benchmark stats as the newest one but I don't believe it will grant twice as much audio processing power. I have an older i7-7700K as a desktop that I don't use at all for over a year now and there was an increase in audio processing power with my laptop but it was minimal. Its been a while and I don't remember by how much but I remember that it was close but the laptop had the edge.

Thanks for playing along, I think it gives us a better view on the capacity of each cpu and what to possibly expect from the newest one without having hands on experience.