Recently, my wonderful wife of 29 years gifted me a new Macbook Pro M1 and a UAD Twin X Quad Interface. After many years, my faithful Windows machine was starting to show its age, and was struggling with larger mix projects (100 + tracks).
Having researched the transitional nature of the new Mac Silicon architecture, and knowing I have 15+ years of software history on my current machine, I was prepared for some pain in the changeover. I had heard a lot of horror stories. As a backup strategy, I had even purchased a copy of Logic Pro X, and was prepared to start anew, should the transition prove impossible.
Was the plugin thing a pain? Yes, but really no more than setting up a new Windows machine (which I have done before). Iām in the middle of an album project, so I need to make sure the mixes open on the new machine. Itās fiddly and time consuming, but it is gradually happeningā¦ Iāve become very patient in my middle age!
The UA interface is not officially supported for Apple Silicon, but I got it to work without too much difficulty. It is pretty awesome, especially the real-time recording consoleā¦
Oh, and BTW, Reaper works fantastically with it, and if I can install the plugin on the Mac, it works with Reaperā¦ so thereās that.
ā¦But hereās the thing, the M1 is absolutely blazingly powerful machine. For example:
ā¦I had set up Reaper to request a buffer size of 32 samples to play some guitar through plugin amp emulations. I forgot I had done that, and opened a project that had 103 tracks and probably 250+ plugins on it, many of them very cpu hungry. Not surprisingly when it played, it was distorted and glitchy. I duly facepalmed myself and set the buffer size back to 256, and it played fineā¦ and then I thought āI wonderā¦will this play at an even lower buffer rate?āā¦ so I cranked the buffer size down to 64 samplesā¦ andā¦ like magic, it played beautifully, cleanly without a gitch!
ā¦Now keep in mind, this same project will only play at a buffer size of 2048 samples on my windows machine, and even then, sometimes it glitches!.. and that machine was no slouch by Windows standardsā¦ it is an i7 with 16Gb of Ram.
I think that illustrates just how powerful the new machine is! Iām really looking forward to being able to have full projects going, and adding a last minute overdub without having to jump through hoops to account for the high latency playback necessary on my old machine.
