Hi guys.

I am having a lot of problems with my M1 Macbook Air. I cannot run more than 3 instances of keyscape. I experience massive memory pressure and barely hit the space bar before I run into system overload in logic. Same in Reaper. Doesn't matter if I run the daws through Rosetta. My old 2013 Macbook Pro runs 10 times better than this. Very confused. Am I doing something wrong or is my machine broken???

 

This is how it looks with just 3 pianos loaded not even playing anything. I have an old Thinkpad right next to me from 2011 with a dual-core cpu for comparison. Handles it way way better. Same with kontakt. If I load just 2 instances of 8Dio Intimate strings, my Macbook just dies.

 

yup that's why 8GB M1 Mac is a no go for audio production or any other actual work;

can you observe if anything changes upon changing audio buffer size?
also, which processes take the memory, when you sort them by memory usage in activity monitor?

 

I mean, I normally run 10 times larger projects on 8 GB 2013 Macbook and 8GB dual core thinkpad. This is in every way a more powerful machine, so obviously i should not experience performance that is less than half of what these much older machines can deliver without problem :/ 8 Gigs is certainly more than enough for all of my needs.

My buffer size is 256 and I have ticked the option to use all high performance cores. I have also tried to disable this option. Increasing to 512 buffer size or more removes the crackles, but it still overloads.

 

thing is, Keyscape runs in Rosetta2 emulation, and in order to use Rosetta2 plugins, your DAW needs to run in Rosetta2 emulation too, which makes it uncomparably more bloating the system resources, almost exponentially worse, especially with any low-latency tasks with multiple plugins like audio is

if I remember correct, default audio buffer size in MacOS defaults is 512, depending on what audio interface you use, there can be quirks with its driver (although it cannot run through Rosetta2 at all, devs may be often lazy to implement proper drivers regardless)

that said, Spectrasonics are very actively developing M1 native versions of their products, claiming that a free upgrade(s) for existing users/customers, so I'd say we all gotta wait.... https://www.spectrasonics.net/news/news-content.php?id=122

 

I just plug my headphones into my Mac honestly :P But yeah, maybe it's just that Rosetta hates audio. Everything else is smooth as asscheeks. Just not my audio software.