Hey Audiosex

Figured I'd pass on some info that I wish I knew sooner. I started my "producing" career on win w/ audacity. After that I tried FL, Ableton, ect, and none really got me into DAW's until I took a course in school on Logic Pro X. The layout, variety of capabilities, simplicity...the workflow really made sense to me, and started me on the path im on now. I bought a cheap 4.1 mac pro for 200$ and she served me well for a couple years until I started digging into Diva and huge Kontakt libraries...she just couldn't keep up.

Knowing I couldn't (or wouldn't) save up for +1000$ for an overpriced mac, and refusing to really get into cubase (nothing wrong with it, just not my cup of tea), I began researching Hackintoshes, and was really intimidated. I couldn't find much on successful builds using Logic, so figured I was shooting in the dark.

Fast forward a bit, I found a 2014 Origin PC desktop for 200$ with an i7 4770k! Did more research and threw an RX 560, 16gb ram, and flashed my mobo to accept a PCI card with an M2 drive I could boot from. After realizing Clover isn't as intimidating as it seems, I got everything properly installed, kekts and all.

I have a Motu mk3 Ultralite that worked out the box. I even figured out how to copy my Mac drive over and she booted instantly with Clover! All my projects from my old Mac grater opened up flawlessly!

All in all, I spend no more than 500$ on this machine - I get a 15000 on Geekbench 4, and a 1gb/2.5gb per second read/write speed that loads projects and Kontakt libraries insanely fast. I can have 10+ instances of Diva playing without freezing, and I could not be happier with this 5 year old machine.

So, to anyone feeling a little Mac curious, IT CAN BE DONE! and CHEAPLY!

If anyone has any interest, and if theres any questions I can answer, give me shout I'd love to help! Hopefully this encourages anyone on the fence.

Happy music making
Trev

P.S. heres royalty free loops I make using all the wonderful software I've learned about from the sister site if anyone is interested!
https://www.looperman.com/loops?mid=thook94

 

Yup I went a step further and hackintoshed a Asus Rog laptop. It's a beast and has the same specs as a top of the line MacBook pro (at the time). It's an Intel i7 and puppy screams. It's a but bulkier than a MacBook pro but I litterly spent thousands less for the same effect.

 

I also still have a z87 i7 4770k + rx580. It is the best 'Mac' I worked with, before I also had Apple Computers but always had Hardware Problems which let m,e always travel far to a Apple Service center which suxx. I recently tried to use OpenCore which makes it even more liek a Apple mac It even works with SIP enabled ! https://khronokernel.github.io/Opencore-Vanilla-Desktop-Guide/

 

just noticed this! Awesome to hear someone else still using the board for a hackintosh too! Recently wanted to update to Mojave for logic 10.5 so I actually did opencore after clover and multibeast were giving me issues. All i can say is WOW, MUCH easier once I wrapped my head around it, somehow I got the on board wifi/bluetooth working so airplay even works!!

thank you if I had checked this a month ago it wouldda saved me some time haha

 

What all of us mac users think when we see the prices of the new model released is:
“Crazy bastards !! forget it, the next computer will be a hackintosh"
Then we start thinking about having to fight with millions of hardware and software problems and eventually abort the project. Now, you say it's easy, but I went to tonymacx86.com and building a pc suitable for macos is not so simple, not to mention all the nerdy tweaks that need to be done and the limitations on software updates. If it were as easy as you say apple computers would have already disappeared from the market.
I would immediately change my mind if the hackintosh mission was simple for real, but from what I know it seems a bloodbath

 

I have a MAC. but do all my music stuff on PC. not really a fan of OSX , its good for daily driver but i can build a better Daw PC for a fraction of the price of a new MAC Pro. and if there is something about my build i dont like i can change it and still be way less out of pocket then the price of a MAC Pro

 

Thnx for your post ,
you could skip the initial paragraph - thats just a bit of background.
i started with windows vista on an HP laptop with nvidia running on a core 2duo in 97 for music and GFX , within 1-5 years the machine gave up fan and cooling system just not equipped to handle what i was doing. i was using Audacity and initial Ableton called G4 live, Realised that i liked Audacity more as my work was to lay music for DVD menu. Then knowing Audacity was open source i Dived deeper into Ubuntu , Mint , OpenSuse using different machines. was just not going back to windows as Vista killed it for me. was happy, just that i had to keep safe margins for troubleshooting - eg audio interface compatibility or some plugins not working , few linux supporting DAWS but did whatever i could manage. Soon i realised that it was not so productive as most of the time one was in the process of making things work or the anticipation of things going wrong somewhere. Then around 2008 got into Mac of things. Noticed the high productivity , and got familiar with everything in no time . Have invested in many mac related software and essential things. A solid Kontakt library base and plugins of different kinds from different companies. Now i have around 80% arsenal all with paid lisences , i keep a chunk of money in for the sound\music investment ledger, look for deals and buy what i like.

Now i know i want a super powerful machine but that financially , mac system is just not possible in India for me at the moment , and last month have plunged into in-depth research of Custom building \ components \ opencore for a Hackintosh.
I have solid concerns about a lot of my iLOK licenses , have many different companies, i vaguely remember some of the seller site mentioning specifically that they don't give support for Hackintosh.

Q 1- Do licensing brokers work on these CustomTosh machines. more precisely does iLok work on it.
Q 2- Are there any specifics for softwares and Plugins that work on it , i am Talking about Legit Plugins with Licenses.
Q 3- Can any Sound Interface work with the given system , or there are some fixed rules about a certain hardware only.

and finally , what about software updates not MACos update but the regular different software, do they all require some sort of a patch.

These are some basic Questions , i'll be looking forward to your reply

 

As we are on the subject of hackintosh, i will paste my previous reply of another thread to encourage ppl on the fence of going hackintosh.

"I wanted to get the macbook pro too a few months ago. However, you have to factor in the fan noise. That can be extremely distracting if you're doing recording or using heavy synths...So that led to the mac pro. Issue is the mac's pro baseline is a joke and with the necessary upgrades it quickly gets outrageous pricewise. The imac/imac pro is nice, but will have you stuck with everything within the screen and that puts limitations on your studio as it grows. Therefore, I decided a hackintosh for the first time was the way to go.

For literally LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE of a comparable mac pro ($5K less) and $400 more than a macbook pro, i'm putting together an 18 core, 64gb ram, Radeon VII, with 3tb nvme storage, dual thunderbolt and dual 10g ethernet hackintosh, which probably beats the mac pro I would have bought. I'm an apple fanboy, but don't let them sucker you into paying huge premiums.

With all this said, if you desperately need to be mobile, and know you ACTUALLY create music on the go, then go with the macbook pro. But a hackintosh's value in 2020 cannot be understated."

 

Macbooks suffer from very bad thermal design, leading to cpu throttling,which is killing for resource demanding audio/music production,
cause it leads to audio drop outs.
Their GPU's are not made for demanding DAW GUI's, like the vector based GUI in FL Studio.

I am holding my breath for coming hot summer, when my macbook 2015's fans will problaby will go through the roof and will still lead to cpu throttling (thus: audio dropouts) when i am working in rather lightweight Projects.

If i had the money, i would buy a killer stacked Hackintosh right away, with proper cooling.

 

YES to all of the above (mostly).

The Audio Interface has to be compatible with the OS you are running. Sometimes you have to update the firmware on it. If it's too old it may not work. But that goes for any Os, Windows and macOS. I've been using Hackintoshes since 2013 and have built 3 Systems by now but plugins as well as iLok has never been an issue.

Thoughts on the Future of Hackintoshing.
OpenCore is the future bootloader for modern Hackintoshes while Clover is a lot easier to get to work. OpenCore is so efficient, the boot times are a third to twice as fast. And if you want to use AMD Ryzen 3 OC it's mandatory.

I can imagine the devs of OC are planning for a future, where ARM-based hackintoshes might bve possible. But i think the x86 based Hackintoshes will work for at least 5 years from the time Apple switches to ARM completely, becasue Aplles has to support the existing hardware that long. They cannot announce the new 2020 iMac based on x86 architecture alongside the new ARM-based MacBook Pro and say," hey the next OS is going to be ARM-only as of tommorow".

There probably will be a transition period where macOS will have both codebases in them. They did that before when they switched from their power PC arrchitecture to Intels x86 platform. They have been silently including the x86 instruction set in their OS 10 prior to Leopard (which was their first x86 only based OS, I think). Over time, they dropped the PowerPC support and only kept the 32 bit and 64 bit x86 codebases down the road. With Catalina, they dropped the 32 bit x86 codebase completely, which makes the system smaller, so now they can incorporate ARM codebase and run that in parallel for a few years und till the drop x86 completely. And until then, I think OpenCore which is stil not in version 1.0 yet will have evolved a lot.

But the the big unknonw is: will there be parts to build an ARM-based Hackintosh in the future? Because there have to be manufactures designing desktop ARM Processors and Mainboards with compatible chipsets of course to be able to build such a machine. So until Qualocomm is challenging AMD and Intel in the desktop market, Hackintosh users could be left behind strnaded on that last X86 based macOS…

It's a bit worrying to me a because I am currently thinking about upgrading my system and switching from Intel to AMD.

 

Last edited: Jun 10, 2020

http://dawprohackintosh.it/

 

Sorry to be offtopic but i read that AMD based Hackintoshes can be problematic regarding audio / music production,
cause of incompatibility with (certain ?) plugins / DAW's, cause they are written for Intel based systems.
Can someone with good knowledge of this maybe shed a detailed light on this ?
If i go Hack way, i would preferably go AMD cause of more Bang for the money but if this is a reall issue, i would stick with the Intel based Hack way.

TIA !

 

Apple is a racist company. Do NOT buy it.

 

you shouldnt compare apples to pears!

 

Nope. Even Sleep Mode works .. Studio One and Ableton works without any problems.. The only things which still don't work properly are Adobe Products (because of the AVX Mode in the CPU, I think AMD still misses that ..) the only thing that still isn't useable is TB3 under AMD ..
There are ton's of Ryzentosh configs now .. Running an AMD Ryzen 3000 Hackintosh is possible and setup was no more difficult than any Intel Hackintosh. But as soon as there will be supported TB3 configs for Ryzen CPUs, I will switch my MB to an ASRock Model

I don't think Apple is going to switch ALL Macs to ARM, only MacBooks, MacBook Air. For all devices with "Pro" in the name they still will use Intel (or AMD), otherwise that would be the death shock to all professional users.

And even if there are only a few X86s left, you can probably still use an iMac 19.1 SMBios for some time (Apple won't cut support anytime soon, the MacBook Pro from 2012 is still officially running).

 

Yep, at least that's the advantage of officially being ther own software and hardware providers, they have not totally gone the obsolescence way, as there are many reports or 7+ years old units still functional, at least on computer side (that's a bit different on iPad and iPhone though)

 

That's illegal stuff unfortunately, reminds me of the good times where official Mac clones were allowed (90's)

 

I've seen some reviews from Hackintosh users who had issues with Logic, Adobe Products and DaVinci Resolve (a patch for AMD exists, though). So I am still a bit hesitant to switch the platform because I make a living using my computer. I'll wait til the beginning of july when the upgraded Ryzen XT Variant is announced. Intel has become lazy in development, underperforming and expansive in comparison to AMD. An i7 9700 k doesesnt even have hyperthreading. Why have 8 threads when you can have 16 or even 24 if yoiu get a Ryzen 3 3900. But since I make a living using my computer, stability is something I have to take into consideration befor I switch from my flawlessly running i7 6700k to a new system with a few questionmarks. But as far as performance is concerned, AMD hands down is the furture.

Here's an user review by someone who uses hackintoshes for media production:

 

hackintosh and macs are overrated as hell. Apple has already admitted to buy some really CHEAP Chinese products, placing those inside until they run out of their battery after a year or two

 

They sell their hackintosh publicly, if it was illegal to sell them why promote what they do with a website?