Nice job on your "mixing into a mastering chain" benchmark test - finally a test that is actually very representive of a real life project and not a channel with 2 stock plugins replicated 200 times!
Great video and advice! There aren't too many YT channels out there benchmarking DAWs. Everyone is focused on video editing. It really comes down to what you do in a DAW. My Logic projects are usually under 60 tracks with about 5-10 virtual instruments, around 3-4 plugins for each track and a little bit of automation on half the tracks (usually just volume). My i7/32GB RAM Mac Mini is still able to handle the work with no issue at 512 samples. If it gets to the point of not being able to handle my projects or I run out of OS upgrades then I will move up to a new M chip. I'm hoping to make it another couple of years and even then I should be able to find a used M2 Mac Mini ;)
To be fair, video editing IS indeed a much more CPU demanding task and it's able to showcase not only the CPU performance but also the GPU performance of the chip. It makes sense to use video editing for benchmarking from a technical standpoint. In comparison, these audio production tests I did do not show anything about the GPU performance. But then that's what made the tests I did to be (I believe) much more helpful for fellow musicians, music producers and audio engineers! And yes, if your current computer is meeting your needs, then there's no need to upgrade. It's just a tool.
@@JamesZhan Absolutely! It's much more exciting to put the chips through the video tests but there are folks like me and you who only use them for audio production. The biggest questions are the memory and CPU. Can the M2 handle audio production or do you need the M2 Pros? Stuff like that. I would really like to have the M2 Air with 24GB RAM but there's not a lot of videos out there about that config and DAWs.
@@marksaxon I have a video on the base M2 MBA. That's only 8GB of RAM though, not sure if that video would be helpful to you. I think there's no way around getting more RAM if you routinely use a lot of sample libraries. Memory swapping shouldn't be used as a "RAM replacement" because it is believed to shorten the lifespan of the SSD if you use a lot of memory swapping very often.
@@JamesZhan Yeah I did see that. That seems to be the trend with a lot of these videos. Take the base model Mac and see what it can do. It can be useful to see how far you can push a bare minimum laptop but it would be fun to see one spec'd a little more realistically for an audio engineer. It's all good and I enjoyed your tests. Still shows off how good these things are. Anyone thinking of using one of these laptops for 3-5 years (or beyond) should definitely spend the extra $$ for memory.
been going back and forth on the m2 pros or air as a beginner producer and think when the times right at least ill upgrade from my 2015 pro to an air. Seems like absolutely everything is incredible with producing and the difference between the airs and pros are negligible especially to beginners. Thanks for all these types of videos, youre the only person i see reviewing the macs from a production standpoint and not editing / videography!
Thanks for commenting and I'm glad you like my videos! And yeah for beginners, you can't go wrong with any of the M-series chips. I know soooo many musicians using even the OG M1 chip as their daily driver without any issues!
Hey you! Good to see you here 😊 *FYI, I did set "Processing Threads" to "10" in Logic before testing.* If you like this video, definitely watch this next! ➡ The Ultimate M1/M2 Mac Buying Guide for Music Production: ua-cam.com/video/VFpCbT3Rx4Y/v-deo.html
Hey just watched the review on the M2 Air - super interesting. For my music teaching needs it certainly seems ample. Yes the joke is that this is an ‘Air’ - in the Intel days that in itself was cringe-worthy. Most impressed with this. Thanks.
@@johnwade7430 Yeah with Apple Silicon the MacBook Airs are a whole different story. Now I will say that if your environment is always very warm, the passive cooling system in the M2 MBA could thermally throttle more than you expected. Just be aware of that factor.
As I’ve said time and time again, if you are a musician or producer, get an M1 with more space and do not get an M2. It’s virtually pointless. I have a refurbished MBP M1 Max and haven’t looked back.
I think this video would’ve worked perfect for me if you had same specs on BOTH computers. (Besides the chips of course) You can’t expect a mac with 64GB RAM AND 4 TB SSD to work close mac with only 16 ram and 512 ssd.. it’s simply never going to be similar… I’m trying to compare an M1 Max with 32ram and 1tb SSD, to a M2 PRO with 32ram and 1tb SSD.. to see which is worth getting
i would like to see this direct comparison too. without seeing it i would assume you should buy whichever is cheaper given the performance difference will be very small
Great Video! 🤘 I use a Mac Studio Max with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD, as well as 5 external SATA SSDs for my sample libraries. Cubase 12 in Native Mode. I can't get it to its limits even though I use a lot of tracks with orchestral libraries. Compared to the 8 Core iMac with 128 GB RAM I used before, everything feels more performant and fluid, and ... silent!!! If you can still get an M1 at a good price, you'll save money and be on the safe side for a long time.
This is a great video. You take practical concepts for musicians, test them and present the data. Scientific process and real results in a non compromised fashion! Bravo on a great idea and implementation. Much appreciated. Cheers
12:23 maybe someone already wrote this, but I’m going to do it anyway. In Logic Audio settings you can change Logic to use all 10cores which you can find under the buffers. Logic gives those leftover cores to run other processes in case the computer needs it. At least for me, when I make music I focus only for it and nothing else so I have the setting always fully reserved for Logic.
WHOA!!!! I just had to pause and thank you for this. I'm on the fence between pulling the trigger on an m2 pro mini and a studio display OR, a m2 max MacBook Pro fully specced out within the next week. THIS is the text I've been looking for. BIG THANKS!!!
Thank you so much for this video. I just got the M2 pro maxed out mini. And I’m sending it back. Because I was running a session with a bunch of instances of NDSP plugins and GGD - and I was getting huge CPU clipping, and it was telling me all sorts of error messages. I thought it would out perform my old iMac Pro, but doesn’t seem to I’d like to know - if you happen to see this - do you recommend sticking with this machine? Or should I look at the studio instead. I’ve tried looking for info online and asking people but honestly this is the most extensive tests I’ve seen and it actually is perfectly applicable to me. So thank you
Hi Rabea, glad to hear you found the video helpful! It sounds like what you experienced shouldn't happen. While the NDSP plugins that don't have native compatibility for M1/M2 take up more CPU power, a few instances of it shouldn't push the CPU to its limits. I'm assuming the session was created in your x86 iMac Pro, right? In my experience, when you try to open a session that was originally created on an x86 system on an ARM Mac, not all plugins will load properly. For example, some plugin companies released their AS native version as separate plugins, so on the M1/M2 computer, you would have to manually replace the x86 plugin with the ARM version. Another thing: Did you use Apple's Migration Assistant to migration from your x86 computer to the ARM one? If so, that could very well be the issue too. I know a couple of people who did this and they ran into all kinds of performance issues. All the issues were gone once they migrated manually. I'm not sure how big your sessions typically are, but the M2 Pro chip should be able to handle large mixing and mastering sessions (at 24/44.1) very comfortably. I know a couple of full-time audio engineers running their studio on an M2 Mac Mini without any issues. When I tested the M2 MBA, it was able to handle all my large mixing and mastering projects with multiple instances of NDSP amp sims too. So I don't think the problem is that your maxed out M2 Pro Mac Mini isn't powerful enough. Sounds like some kind of system glitch that you can try to troubleshoot and see if that solves the problem? Maybe reset the Mac and manually install all the plugins for that session and try opening it again?
@@JamesZhan thank you for the reply! So this was a new session created on my M2 pro mini. I was running my NDSP archetype which was developed to run natively with M1 - I know it’s a CPU heavy plugin, possibly more than Nolly, and I was running maybe 12 instances of it. But I use UA plugins and they’re all handled with the hardware. Only a few other plugins like some waves and Soothe etc. and GGD of course. I was getting Midi sync error messages, additionally i was getting getting a message saying the sample rate was changing? It was happening mostly when GGD was playing a Tom heavy section. On top of this, I changed processing threads to maximum and buffer size to 1024 and still the issues were so bad, I couldn’t bounce the session out. However I updated logic today, and ran the same session with absolutely no issues and I’m completely confused at this point. I’ve already arranged for the mini to be collected in the morning. But seeing this video I’m worried I’ve made a mistake and acted impulsively. So migrating over TB4 from my iMac Pro to this machine you think may have caused issues? Do you have any advice on that? Lastly - if I did send it back, and got the studio M1 ultra or something crazy like that, I guess I wouldn’t have the issue - outside of the horrific price. Thank you so much for replying and I appreciate the in depth answer! Any more advice would be greatly appreciated because if you think I should cancel collection I will!
@@RabeaMassaad Based on the kind of error messages you were getting, it definitely seems like it's not a CPU performance issue. Sample rate was changing? That's very bizarre! If it were a CPU performance issue, you would just be getting the "System Overload" pop-up from Logic. Honestly, if the issue isn't CPU performance related, then I'm worried you would be getting the same thing even with an M1 Ultra. Perhaps do some investigating and testing before sending it back? For example, try factory resetting the Mac (it's a very simple 1 button click on Ventura), then download the plugins needed for that session, and see how it runs. What if you replace the 12 instances of amp sims with a different one? If you did use Migration Assist for the transition, that could very well be the cause of the issue (just based on what I've read). I also want to be clear that I'm by no means a computer engineer, and I'm just trying to brainstorm some troubleshooting ideas here, so please take my words with a grain of salt :)
@@JamesZhan thank you for the reply I really appreciate it! Hmm. At this point I fear I’ve made a mistake. Based on what you’re saying. On top of the results I had today trying the same session again, and multiple different buffer sizes etc AND the fact logic updated today, and rescanned all my plugins. I didn’t run into the issue. The problem with starting a fresh is the sheer undertaking involved haha. And I’ve only got until tomorrow morning as it doesn’t seem a can cancel the return at this stage. I think I’ve Kinda jumped the gun here as it seems the M2 Pro mini is almost just what I need. If only I’d seen this video last week 😭😭😭
@@RabeaMassaad So everything is working fine now? That's great then! Could be just a bad Logic glitch that's been fixed in the update. Is there really no way to cancel the return? If the person shows up, can you just tell him to go back empty-handed? Apple has really good customer service so I feel like you should be able to cancel the return somehow (talk to Apple's customer support maybe?). Worse comes to worst, I guess you can always just order the same computer again 😂 I would agree with you that the M2 Pro Mac mini should be perfect for you! Once you get into the Ultra territory you are spending a lot of the money on the GPU and the video encoders, which, if you are not going to take advantage of them, would make it a very terrible use of your money. I totally agree starting from scratch is a massive undertaking. It took me a week to get all the essentials done, and then some more to complete the full migration. That said, I found that it was a great opportunity to really clear out the clutter. There were so many plugins that I barely used on my old computer and so many files and projects that were not properly organized. The manual migration forced me to properly organize everything and keep my new Mac as clutter free as possible. Anyway, hope you get to keep your M2 Pro Mini! And I hope your new Mac will serve you well.
Hey James! Thank you for your hard work and all the analysis. That helps me a lot and you are actually my best source regarding MChips and audio engineering. Thanks again and have a good day :)
thanks so much for this breakdown. i'm about to invest in my first apple silicone, and your tests mirrored many of my requirements and uses, especially with reaper. my 2014 MBP has done its job dutifully for the past 8 years, but i cannot even imagine the difference i'm going to feel moving up.
The reason Reaper can use more the cpu is because it only needs two of the cores operate, same with the ram, only two mbs, that’s because it is based in universal binary code.
This was super interesting. I really wonder how Reaper is able to use the efficiency cores and get better results. I hope one day Logic and Ableton can adopt whatever is going on there. I upgraded from an i5 windows laptop to a Mac Mini M2 Pro base (10 core, 16 gig ram) with a 1TB drive, so far I’m super impressed with how Ableton 11 and all my Arturia synth plugins are running. This machine seemed like the best value of the Minis, otherwise you’re getting into Studio pricing.
Yeah it's quite a mystery. I hope maybe a Mac software developer would be able to offer an educated guess haha. The Max and Ultra versions of the M-series chips are really bad bang for the buck for music production imo, because those chips seem to be designed mainly for very heavy graphic work. Like don't get me wrong, those chips would absolutely kill for audio production but if one doesn't do any video/graphic work, they are paying for a lot of those GPU cores for no reason. All I'm saying is, yes you are right, the M2 Pro chip is definitely a great value for music production!
@@JamesZhan Under REAPER preferences > buffering there is a option for FX Processing/multiprocessing (Anticipative FX processing) which is REAPER's smart way of creating a secondary render ahead buffer so that all cores are used effectively, if this setting is disabled, I would love to see if you get the same results.
I tested it on my M1 and the difference in performance with REAPER is definitely due to Anticipate FX processing. When disabled, the efficiency cores decline in usage and the performance cores increase proportionally.
You can’t maintain the delay compensation algorithm required to sync all the audio threads/tracks with their individual latency (due to the different processing and plugins in each chain) spread in parallel across multiple CPU cores running at different frequencies. I hope this makes sense 😅 Same for games and other monolithic applications that require to maintain a coherent synced rendering for their purpose. These sub-performance cores are good to run small system processes in a multitask environment (like the OS itself) or for some apps that can use non-synced parallel processing for sub tasks. I don’t know Reaper but it seems that they figured out a way to run a specific sub-loop of their code for the feature you are referring to in these E-cores. Same on the Windows/PC side, last gen AMD 7950x gives Ableton Live more headroom than Intel 13900k because AMD has “all cores same speed” versus Intel that has performance/efficient cores like Apple silicon. James, thanks for your great content, I got all the info I was searching for to choose a Mac setup I’m forced to add to my studio for an “iOS only” app. 👍🏻
I purchased a M2 Pro Mac Mini last year and the performance has been far poorer than I expected. I wish I'd seen your videos before buying that M2 Pro. Your videos are extremely helpful! Thanks!!
Thank you for actually putting a REAL chain plugin for mastering or mixing as supposed to stock EQ and compressor with 200+ tracks 😂 I understand UA-camrs who are not in the space do this but your video has been the most realistic!
Haha, I appreciate your kind words!! The reason I started doing these Mac videos for music production was that back then I noticed no one was testing the computers properly for music production. The reviews were always mostly focused on video and coding, and when it comes to music production, the one test many channels used was trying to see how many tracks of synthesizer Logic can load. I was like, "damn that doesn't show us ANYTHING" haha
It's not just the sample libraries that use up a lot of RAM. Plugins too. This is probably due to modern GUIs. For example try loading something like an Arturia Jupiter 8V on a 5k Apple Studio Display with 120% scaling. You'll be shocked to learn it uses 1.1GB of RAM. It's nuts. Something like U-he Diva uses about 180MB by comparison and something like Tal J-8 even less at 80MB. It gets even more interesting with how plugins manage themselves in relation to memory. If you close the GUI in the DAW the RAM usage generally goes down as well. Some DAWs are also better than others. Bitwig for example, as much as I love it, is a RAM hog compared to say Logic. Empty project in Logic sits at about 358MB Ram. Bitwig and its various components sit at nearly 2GB for an empty project. All that said, on a M1 macbook air with 16GB ram I was able to create a project that loaded every single kit Logic has plus 2 producer kits with multi outs. That's 22 kits if I remember correctly. I also loaded three of the Logic pianos (the Bosendorfer, the Steinway and the Yamaha grand). About 10 electronic multi out kits. Upright ballad bass. Upright studio bass. Fingerstyle and Liverpool basses. Each of these with their respective preset channel strips. Basically I just used the Logic library to load presets onto a channel. The above was about 135 tracks total and who knows how many plugins per channel strip. Usually about 4 but the average might be a little lower. Certainly well over a couple of hundred plugins though. Logic memory usage was 9.82GB. If you can live with stock Logic plugins I think a 16GB notebook is more than enough. Kontakt and other samplers are a different story obviously. Memory behaviour gets even more interesting though. Just swapping between different views in Logic impacted memory. Arranger window would sit at 358MB at idle but toggle the mixer view and RAM usage drops to 328MB of Ram. I was shocked at how much RAM some plugins used though. Softube and Arturia for example are some of the worst offenders. It's probably to do with their photo realistic UI. Anyway this is just to say there are some complex behaviours to be observed and be mindful of when it comes to RAM usage with respective DAWs and plugins. It's not just the sample libraries but they are the worst offenders I guess.
First, congratulations! Your tests are the best for music production! Next, a request: Please make a test focused on the base MBA (8 Gb RAM/256 GB RAM). I can imagine a lot of people, like me, that produce music at home studios, generally with one or two amp sims, a drum and a keyboard VST loaded. Would the base model mac be enought to handle this basic/intermediate use? Other test that would help a lot of people would be compare mac vs windows performances with similar specs. I am particularly interested in RAM use comparisons. Keep up the good work!
Excellent audio review of the machines, thank you. And very wise words at the end. As a note, I wish I could remember where from, i read in Logic pro, it can run more efficiently at lower buffers, 128 and below. I’m trying this now with current projects, admittedly not as massive as your tests, and it is working well on a M1 Max chip.
I also bought my Mac at Apple Eaton Center! Small world haha. System shutdown? That sure sounds weird, but I'm glad your experience has been mostly positive!
Hey! Very nice video. One question... my iMac 27" (2019) is maxing out with bigger projects (Ableton). It's an Intel i5 (3.0 GHz) with 64GB RAM. The RAM is not the problem here. I think 32GB would actually be more than enough. I think it's more about the CPU itself... If I want to upgrade which is better? 1. MacBook Air M2 16/512 2. MacBook Pro M2 Pro 16/512 I'm using very CPU intense plugins from iZotope (Ozone 11), Kontakt, Farbfilter etc... is the Air M2 enough or should I go with a M2 pro? Thanks in advance...
The Beatles made the Sgt. Pepper's album on two 4 track machines. My 2019 first gen i9 Macbook, 32 gig of RAM, can load 160 instances/tracks of Kontact playing every articulation of 6 different Spitfire libraries simultaneously. You can get a really clean 2019 Macbook for $1000 and if you need more tracks than that you might be doing something wrong.
i'm on a i9 9900K currently. I've been thinking about upgrading to and m2 pro , sure about the better performances. My th-u (ultra oversampling) count is 564 track opened without problems. This result discourages me a bit about changing the hardware, I thought it might be a better upgrade
To choose the number of processing threads Logic Pro uses: Choose Logic Pro > Settings (or Preferences) > Audio. Click the Processing Threads pop-up window, then choose an option. The options available depend on the number of CPU cores in your Mac and if your Mac supports Hyper-Threading.* Click Apply.
This is a great comparison, thorough and to the point. I had very similar results with my M2Pro Mini and was surprised to see that in almost every music related test, the M1Max chips was either more powerful or made better use of the overall resources even with the M2pro's higher clock speeds. I really wanted to keep our M2Pro mini, as I love the form factor, but ended up returning it for an M1 Max Studio and couldn't be happier as it literally tears through heavy tracks counts and huge plugin stacks. All with zero fan noise or heat in a critical listening environment. And the M2Pro got hot...like HOT!
@@booq5559 In our heavy projects, side by side, the real world performance of both were VERY similar, less than 5% difference most of the time. But the Mini got a lot hotter for a LOT longer, like most overclocked CPU setups. The Studio was literally room temp at full loads for hours on end. The sustained crazy high thermals on the M2 max will definitely yield a shorter overall lifespan. Judging from the frequency of Apple's new releases, planed obsolescence may be deliberate on their part.
Hey James Zhan, Really appreciate your testing and explanations in your videos on M series chips, it’s been super helpful. Are you doing a video + testing of M3 chips? Also can you please include Studio One in your future testing? 🙏🏻
Does Mac have any NVMe gen 5 comparable storage or is it all gen 4? Likewise , dose Mac use comparable DDR5 or DDR4? Thanks for the awesome informative video!
I'm ever in overload system with my m1 macbook air 8gb ram / 256 ssd. I really need more power, maybe I buy a macbook pro m1pro 16 gb ram or maybe a Macmini m1 16 gb of ram. I must decide...
Very very good test! I suggest an upgrade that no one have done yet. Test acustica audio plug in , in particular sienna hog simulation + diamond eq + lift 3 + ash
Hi James would like to know your opinion about Live looping (low latency) and which CPU performs better for that ? M2 Pro 3480 MHz ? M1 Max 3200 Mhz ? M2 Air ?... Also I have some concerns about the newer models since I can get refurbished of M1 Max around the same price
Hi James! great job as always! I plan to buy a Mac Studio Max either with 64 GB RAM or with 96GB RAM. My reasoning is that I plan to work with many VIs. Should I choose the one with the more RAM? thank you!!! Keep Up the good work. Many thanks again for your time! all the very best, Kostas
I use Ableton Live as my only DAW - Does this mean that an M2 air with 4 performance cores will give me half the performance of the M2 Pro with 8 performance cores / M1 with 8 performance cores? Are you able to guess the likely % increase in cpu power when using ableton live? I'm trying to decide between M2 15 inch air 8 core, M2 16 inch pro 12 core and, M1 16 inch Pro 10 core.
Thanks for the informative video! I wonder if REAPER is using the efficiency cores for Anticipative FX Processing? Perhaps someone could turn it off in the preferences on a project and see if the efficiency core usage goes down. This might indicate whether using the efficiency cores is something open to other DAWs in the future or not, since most DAW dev teams have sworn off the “pre-processing” approach.
I'm thinking about a M2 pro 8gb/256 for music production and work. But today I have a normal PC with Intel core i9 and 16GB RAM. Does it worth the change? (Both are the same price, so if I sell my PC I will be able to buy the macbook).
@@g.o.9513 I’m more of a songwriter that tries to write and record kinda like a mad scientist, and I will often have my laptop and everything on for hours, sometimes even all day just coming and going as I feel inspired. Do you think I should still stick with the pro because I use some intense vsts like omnisphere, sd3, native instruments etc. I’d imagine you’re more organized than me and will do a focused session, and then shut it all down within a few hours.
@@mitchmcturtle6890 The gap between the pro and air is inconsequential. More importantly, freezing tracks can enhance your workflow by reducing the need for real-time processing. Once a track is frozen, you can playback, edit, and mix without requiring the CPU to process the frozen track's audio. Freezing tracks helps optimize resource allocation, ensuring a stable and reliable performance during mixing and playback.
Hi James, thanks for your insight by this video. Have you ever test this m2 with other daw? Like presonus studio one. I am a studio one user on 2020 i7 imac and plan to upgrade to apple silicon, maybe you can give your thought, Thank you
YO man I really like your videos, I have watched the Macbook ones many times and your drum library ones over the last couple years as well. This is anecdotal, but I got the M2 Pro 16 inch 16GB with 1TB and I had to return it because Logic ran noticeably worse than my Hackintosh from 2018 that runs Mojave... (i7-8700k). I ended up ordering the M1 Max 16 since I am hoping that Monterey will be a bit more stable than Venura was for me. Time will tell! Thanks for your effort in all of these videos, they're super helpful.
@@suzukitaka4470 So far, so good. It is handling my sessions way better and the CPU seems to be having an easy time. Not one crash, and I got crashes a few times an hour on Ventura. I am running Logic in Native mode after validating all the plugins in Rosetta mode like James mentioned
Hey Joey, glad to hear you liked my videos! It's really strange what you experienced. I will say that if you used migration assistant to migrate from your x86 system to Apple Silicon, that might just be the culprit. I have read in multiple forums that migration assistant does not work well for migrating from x86 to ARM.
@@JamesZhan No migration assistant, I just think that my plugins did not play nicely with Ventura, so I got a machine that came with Monterey and it really made a massive difference.
Well am just going to buy a Mac mechine but is a bit confused wether to get the M2 Pro MacBook or go with the M2 pro Mac mini can help me out with chossing the correct one, Well am a music producer and an audio engineer
You tested for the DAW to complain about track overload instead of testing for how many tracks could actually be played back at settings without failure. Therefore you only tested adding up estimates of plugin compute and not actual CPU metrics while the plugins were running. Logic has settings for utilizing different amounts of cores including all cores (I suspect since you didn't show them you are just using the automatic setting). In practice I'm not sure why would you want to max out your efficiency cores as other processes on your machine have to run and you want to leave some overhead so your audio processing does not hiccup. My anecdotal experience running SD3 AU and 8+ interface inputs across 16x2 outputs on M1 Max studio has been that Reaper seems slightly less resilient to maintaining audio scheduling without glitching than Logic under comparable settings. Generally @ 96K with 64 samples I report no glitches and they are few enough @ 32 samples that I can work. If you want to amplify your parallel processing ability while avoiding dropouts (which will happen long before you max out your cores at any tolerable buffer size for "real-time" monitoring) you will likely find that you will achieve better results spreading the load across multiple DAW instances than trying to support the same amount from a single DAW. More thoroughly though, if you wish to trigger audio from more than one midi device I would not recommend allowing more than 1 CoreMIDI input device to be registered per audio application instance due to the shortcomings in CoreMIDI's underlying IPC mechanism. Under no circumstances am I able to reliably work in a multichannel tracking environment @ 192K on M1 Max Studio.
Do you have the Logic cores set to automatic? If so Logic will ignore the efficiency cores altogether but you can use them by selecting them in the Logic preferences under Processing Threads. Also if you want to get the highest performance out of logic also set the Process Buffer Range to Large this has no effect on latency only it sets the size of the RAM's buffer to disk and is used to compute mixes and effects, but has no effect live inputs. Lastly you should set the multithreading option to playback and live tracks, it is set to playback only as the default due to how x86 intel processors handled audio. x86 Intel CPUs were better at 1 thread per process and multithread recording was not great but was good for playback. But for Apple silicon's RISC architecture multithreaded playback and live tracks is the most efficient option for Logic. Multithreading playback and live tracks will spread a multithread enabled plugin (most modern plugins have this) or live ARM'ed to record inputs across multiple cores to keep single core overloading from happening. Great review by the way an this is great content for the entire audio community!! Cheers!
@@JamesZhan Good to know! Oops! I didn't see the pinned comment!! I wasn't trying to be an annoying Logic fanboy troll so I hope it didn't come across as that🤣 LOL!! Cheers!
I have a 2017 MacBook Pro (largest screen available)- it’s a 3.1 GHz i7 core processor 1TB 16gb of ram and my Logic Pro session gave me a notification stating “system overload” I had 16 tracks playing with some plug ins. I believe one of the reasons for this is because I have 16 tracks that are all basically midi tracks but idk
Im thinking about getting an M2 Pro. My only doubt is on the RAM I should be getting. For an user that uses vst synths and sample libraries like Keyscape or Omnisphere or vst drums is 16 GB ram enough? Or should I be aiming to get the 32 gb ram. Thanks !
Did you do similar testing for Pro Tools and Cubase as well by any chance? Those are the two DAWs I‘m using and I‘ll be upgrading to Apple silicon soon. Thanks!
Hey, liking your channel, one of the few I could find that does tech reviews from an audio perspective. I'm thinking about upgrading my producing/engineering laptop from a 2019 Razer with an i7 9750H to a 16 inch M1 pro or max with 32 gig of RAM. What are the fans like on yours when under decent load? I've heard these newer macbooks stay near silent most of the time, and although my intel has served me well it has always been on the loud side, even when I'm not doing much at all, which isn't ideal from an audio perspective. I'd appreciate if you could tell me the experience you've had with yours, thanks!
The only times the fans activate are when I'm rendering a complex 4K video (like this one you watched), but even then, it's very, very quiet. I would have to put my ear very close to the computer to hear them. Fan noise is the last thing you will need to worry about with the Apple Silicon MacBooks imo!
Hey, I can get a MBP 14" M2 Pro 16GB 512GB and MBP 16" M1 Max 32GB 1TB at the same price, after discounts. Which one should I go for? My primary use case is mobile and web development, with multiple chrome profiles and tabs open most of the time. Thanks
Ableton's threading is really bad. You can try this out: Enable multiple instances. Do a project and fill it plugins up (separate channels)to the point where you start to get drop outs, then remove few to get stable playback. Save the project and launch another instacne and load the same proejct. Magic! There is a good chance that both projects run just fine despite they are on the verge of dropping out on their own :/
i want to hear the tracks being reproduced in reaper to see if they are in sync. with latency compensation trickery that daws need to make its weird why logic wasnt able to perform better since apple owns it. also, was the latency the same for all daws? im intrigued.
Wow the M1 Max beat the M2 pro across the board? I just hopped on the internet to do some last minute research before buying a Macbook Pro 16' tomorrow. Any real-world idea of M2 Max will compete with the M1 Max? I figured the M2 Max would be easily justifiable and now I'm very confused about which to buy.
Well, it makes sense that the 10-core M1 Max beats the 10-core M2 Pro since M1 Max has 2 more efficiency cores. I'm not sure if M1 Max beats the 12-core M2 Pro chip though. I don't have the M2 Max, but just by logic I would assume M2 Max has more performance then the M1 Max. It would make no sense if the second gen Max chip didn't outperform the first gen Max chip.
Nice job on your "mixing into a mastering chain" benchmark test - finally a test that is actually very representive of a real life project and not a channel with 2 stock plugins replicated 200 times!
Couldn’t agree more with you! Instant like and a subscribe!
I know an engineer at Ableton. I'm going to bring this up
Any update on this? What did they say? Really curious to know!
same
Reaper is obviously far superior to every other DAW when it comes to stability and CPU performance. Always has been.
@douglasfrederick127 any update on this?
@@ezrashantilies
Great video and advice! There aren't too many YT channels out there benchmarking DAWs. Everyone is focused on video editing. It really comes down to what you do in a DAW. My Logic projects are usually under 60 tracks with about 5-10 virtual instruments, around 3-4 plugins for each track and a little bit of automation on half the tracks (usually just volume). My i7/32GB RAM Mac Mini is still able to handle the work with no issue at 512 samples. If it gets to the point of not being able to handle my projects or I run out of OS upgrades then I will move up to a new M chip. I'm hoping to make it another couple of years and even then I should be able to find a used M2 Mac Mini ;)
To be fair, video editing IS indeed a much more CPU demanding task and it's able to showcase not only the CPU performance but also the GPU performance of the chip. It makes sense to use video editing for benchmarking from a technical standpoint.
In comparison, these audio production tests I did do not show anything about the GPU performance.
But then that's what made the tests I did to be (I believe) much more helpful for fellow musicians, music producers and audio engineers!
And yes, if your current computer is meeting your needs, then there's no need to upgrade. It's just a tool.
@@JamesZhan Absolutely! It's much more exciting to put the chips through the video tests but there are folks like me and you who only use them for audio production. The biggest questions are the memory and CPU. Can the M2 handle audio production or do you need the M2 Pros? Stuff like that. I would really like to have the M2 Air with 24GB RAM but there's not a lot of videos out there about that config and DAWs.
@@marksaxon I have a video on the base M2 MBA. That's only 8GB of RAM though, not sure if that video would be helpful to you.
I think there's no way around getting more RAM if you routinely use a lot of sample libraries. Memory swapping shouldn't be used as a "RAM replacement" because it is believed to shorten the lifespan of the SSD if you use a lot of memory swapping very often.
@@JamesZhan Yeah I did see that. That seems to be the trend with a lot of these videos. Take the base model Mac and see what it can do. It can be useful to see how far you can push a bare minimum laptop but it would be fun to see one spec'd a little more realistically for an audio engineer. It's all good and I enjoyed your tests. Still shows off how good these things are. Anyone thinking of using one of these laptops for 3-5 years (or beyond) should definitely spend the extra $$ for memory.
been going back and forth on the m2 pros or air as a beginner producer and think when the times right at least ill upgrade from my 2015 pro to an air. Seems like absolutely everything is incredible with producing and the difference between the airs and pros are negligible especially to beginners. Thanks for all these types of videos, youre the only person i see reviewing the macs from a production standpoint and not editing / videography!
Thanks for commenting and I'm glad you like my videos!
And yeah for beginners, you can't go wrong with any of the M-series chips. I know soooo many musicians using even the OG M1 chip as their daily driver without any issues!
Awesome video! The only proper comparison for us music producers/mixers. Great work!
Hey you! Good to see you here 😊 *FYI, I did set "Processing Threads" to "10" in Logic before testing.*
If you like this video, definitely watch this next! ➡ The Ultimate M1/M2 Mac Buying Guide for Music Production:
ua-cam.com/video/VFpCbT3Rx4Y/v-deo.html
Hey just watched the review on the M2 Air - super interesting. For my music teaching needs it certainly seems ample.
Yes the joke is that this is an ‘Air’ - in the Intel days that in itself was cringe-worthy.
Most impressed with this. Thanks.
@@johnwade7430 Yeah with Apple Silicon the MacBook Airs are a whole different story. Now I will say that if your environment is always very warm, the passive cooling system in the M2 MBA could thermally throttle more than you expected. Just be aware of that factor.
No, you don't 😂
As I’ve said time and time again, if you are a musician or producer, get an M1 with more space and do not get an M2. It’s virtually pointless. I have a refurbished MBP M1 Max and haven’t looked back.
I have the budget rn to get an m2 1tb 16gig ram do you think I sh bite the bullet?
@@AditKapoorget a M1 Max for less than the price of M2 Pro.
I think this video would’ve worked perfect for me if you had same specs on BOTH computers. (Besides the chips of course) You can’t expect a mac with 64GB RAM AND 4 TB SSD to work close mac with only 16 ram and 512 ssd.. it’s simply never going to be similar… I’m trying to compare an M1 Max with 32ram and 1tb SSD, to a M2 PRO with 32ram and 1tb SSD.. to see which is worth getting
i would like to see this direct comparison too. without seeing it i would assume you should buy whichever is cheaper given the performance difference will be very small
Me too.
Agreed.
Agreed.
This is a very, VERY good video!
Well done, thank you
The graphs were also great and helpful
Thank you! Glad you like it :)
THIS IS WHAT I REALLY WANTED. I LOVE REAPER. THINKING OF SWITCHING TO LOGIC BUT I HAVE TO CONSIDER MANY FACTORS.
This is one of the most useful videos in awhile. And the follow-up also. Added real value. Thank you.
Great Video! 🤘
I use a Mac Studio Max with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD, as well as 5 external SATA SSDs for my sample libraries. Cubase 12 in Native Mode. I can't get it to its limits even though I use a lot of tracks with orchestral libraries.
Compared to the 8 Core iMac with 128 GB RAM I used before, everything feels more performant and fluid, and ... silent!!!
If you can still get an M1 at a good price, you'll save money and be on the safe side for a long time.
How many tracks able to Mac studio Max m1 for orchestral laibrary
This is a great video. You take practical concepts for musicians, test them and present the data. Scientific process and real results in a non compromised fashion!
Bravo on a great idea and implementation.
Much appreciated.
Cheers
been looking for a video like this for ages thank you!
12:23 maybe someone already wrote this, but I’m going to do it anyway. In Logic Audio settings you can change Logic to use all 10cores which you can find under the buffers. Logic gives those leftover cores to run other processes in case the computer needs it. At least for me, when I make music I focus only for it and nothing else so I have the setting always fully reserved for Logic.
WHOA!!!! I just had to pause and thank you for this. I'm on the fence between pulling the trigger on an m2 pro mini and a studio display OR, a m2 max MacBook Pro fully specced out within the next week. THIS is the text I've been looking for. BIG THANKS!!!
Glad to hear you find my video helpful!! Hope you enjoy your new machine 😃
@lord-king which one did you get?
@@Ben-ll3iy m2 pro Mac mini
Thank you so much for this video. I just got the M2 pro maxed out mini. And I’m sending it back. Because I was running a session with a bunch of instances of NDSP plugins and GGD - and I was getting huge CPU clipping, and it was telling me all sorts of error messages.
I thought it would out perform my old iMac Pro, but doesn’t seem to
I’d like to know - if you happen to see this - do you recommend sticking with this machine? Or should I look at the studio instead.
I’ve tried looking for info online and asking people but honestly this is the most extensive tests I’ve seen and it actually is perfectly applicable to me. So thank you
Hi Rabea, glad to hear you found the video helpful!
It sounds like what you experienced shouldn't happen. While the NDSP plugins that don't have native compatibility for M1/M2 take up more CPU power, a few instances of it shouldn't push the CPU to its limits.
I'm assuming the session was created in your x86 iMac Pro, right? In my experience, when you try to open a session that was originally created on an x86 system on an ARM Mac, not all plugins will load properly.
For example, some plugin companies released their AS native version as separate plugins, so on the M1/M2 computer, you would have to manually replace the x86 plugin with the ARM version.
Another thing: Did you use Apple's Migration Assistant to migration from your x86 computer to the ARM one? If so, that could very well be the issue too. I know a couple of people who did this and they ran into all kinds of performance issues. All the issues were gone once they migrated manually.
I'm not sure how big your sessions typically are, but the M2 Pro chip should be able to handle large mixing and mastering sessions (at 24/44.1) very comfortably. I know a couple of full-time audio engineers running their studio on an M2 Mac Mini without any issues.
When I tested the M2 MBA, it was able to handle all my large mixing and mastering projects with multiple instances of NDSP amp sims too.
So I don't think the problem is that your maxed out M2 Pro Mac Mini isn't powerful enough. Sounds like some kind of system glitch that you can try to troubleshoot and see if that solves the problem? Maybe reset the Mac and manually install all the plugins for that session and try opening it again?
@@JamesZhan thank you for the reply!
So this was a new session created on my M2 pro mini.
I was running my NDSP archetype which was developed to run natively with M1 - I know it’s a CPU heavy plugin, possibly more than Nolly, and I was running maybe 12 instances of it.
But I use UA plugins and they’re all handled with the hardware. Only a few other plugins like some waves and Soothe etc. and GGD of course.
I was getting Midi sync error messages, additionally i was getting getting a message saying the sample rate was changing? It was happening mostly when GGD was playing a Tom heavy section.
On top of this, I changed processing threads to maximum and buffer size to 1024 and still the issues were so bad, I couldn’t bounce the session out.
However I updated logic today, and ran the same session with absolutely no issues and I’m completely confused at this point.
I’ve already arranged for the mini to be collected in the morning. But seeing this video I’m worried I’ve made a mistake and acted impulsively.
So migrating over TB4 from my iMac Pro to this machine you think may have caused issues?
Do you have any advice on that?
Lastly - if I did send it back, and got the studio M1 ultra or something crazy like that, I guess I wouldn’t have the issue - outside of the horrific price.
Thank you so much for replying and I appreciate the in depth answer!
Any more advice would be greatly appreciated because if you think I should cancel collection I will!
@@RabeaMassaad Based on the kind of error messages you were getting, it definitely seems like it's not a CPU performance issue. Sample rate was changing? That's very bizarre! If it were a CPU performance issue, you would just be getting the "System Overload" pop-up from Logic.
Honestly, if the issue isn't CPU performance related, then I'm worried you would be getting the same thing even with an M1 Ultra.
Perhaps do some investigating and testing before sending it back? For example, try factory resetting the Mac (it's a very simple 1 button click on Ventura), then download the plugins needed for that session, and see how it runs.
What if you replace the 12 instances of amp sims with a different one?
If you did use Migration Assist for the transition, that could very well be the cause of the issue (just based on what I've read).
I also want to be clear that I'm by no means a computer engineer, and I'm just trying to brainstorm some troubleshooting ideas here, so please take my words with a grain of salt :)
@@JamesZhan thank you for the reply I really appreciate it!
Hmm. At this point I fear I’ve made a mistake. Based on what you’re saying. On top of the results I had today trying the same session again, and multiple different buffer sizes etc AND the fact logic updated today, and rescanned all my plugins.
I didn’t run into the issue.
The problem with starting a fresh is the sheer undertaking involved haha. And I’ve only got until tomorrow morning as it doesn’t seem a can cancel the return at this stage.
I think I’ve Kinda jumped the gun here as it seems the M2 Pro mini is almost just what I need. If only I’d seen this video last week 😭😭😭
@@RabeaMassaad So everything is working fine now? That's great then! Could be just a bad Logic glitch that's been fixed in the update.
Is there really no way to cancel the return? If the person shows up, can you just tell him to go back empty-handed? Apple has really good customer service so I feel like you should be able to cancel the return somehow (talk to Apple's customer support maybe?). Worse comes to worst, I guess you can always just order the same computer again 😂
I would agree with you that the M2 Pro Mac mini should be perfect for you! Once you get into the Ultra territory you are spending a lot of the money on the GPU and the video encoders, which, if you are not going to take advantage of them, would make it a very terrible use of your money.
I totally agree starting from scratch is a massive undertaking. It took me a week to get all the essentials done, and then some more to complete the full migration.
That said, I found that it was a great opportunity to really clear out the clutter. There were so many plugins that I barely used on my old computer and so many files and projects that were not properly organized. The manual migration forced me to properly organize everything and keep my new Mac as clutter free as possible.
Anyway, hope you get to keep your M2 Pro Mini! And I hope your new Mac will serve you well.
Hey James! Thank you for your hard work and all the analysis. That helps me a lot and you are actually my best source regarding MChips and audio engineering. Thanks again and have a good day :)
thanks so much for this breakdown. i'm about to invest in my first apple silicone, and your tests mirrored many of my requirements and uses, especially with reaper. my 2014 MBP has done its job dutifully for the past 8 years, but i cannot even imagine the difference i'm going to feel moving up.
Glad to hear that my tests mirrored many of your uses! And yes I think you will be blown away if you get an Apple Silicon Mac!
Same here. I have been on a 2013 Mac book Pro. Getting ready to upgrade.
Thank you so much for this amazing comparison! This was EXACTLY what I was looking for!
Shopping for an M2 currently. This video is super helpful bro!
This is a very detailled review and comparison, IT WAS OF MUCH HELP. Subscribed 😃
The reason Reaper can use more the cpu is because it only needs two of the cores operate, same with the ram, only two mbs, that’s because it is based in universal binary code.
I got the M2 Pro as well with 32GRAM 1TB , Using LOGIC & UAD Apollo…. It’s a walk in the park
With orchestra vsts 😂😂😂
This was super interesting. I really wonder how Reaper is able to use the efficiency cores and get better results. I hope one day Logic and Ableton can adopt whatever is going on there. I upgraded from an i5 windows laptop to a Mac Mini M2 Pro base (10 core, 16 gig ram) with a 1TB drive, so far I’m super impressed with how Ableton 11 and all my Arturia synth plugins are running. This machine seemed like the best value of the Minis, otherwise you’re getting into Studio pricing.
Yeah it's quite a mystery. I hope maybe a Mac software developer would be able to offer an educated guess haha.
The Max and Ultra versions of the M-series chips are really bad bang for the buck for music production imo, because those chips seem to be designed mainly for very heavy graphic work.
Like don't get me wrong, those chips would absolutely kill for audio production but if one doesn't do any video/graphic work, they are paying for a lot of those GPU cores for no reason.
All I'm saying is, yes you are right, the M2 Pro chip is definitely a great value for music production!
@@JamesZhan Under REAPER preferences > buffering there is a option for FX Processing/multiprocessing (Anticipative FX processing) which is REAPER's smart way of creating a secondary render ahead buffer so that all cores are used effectively, if this setting is disabled, I would love to see if you get the same results.
I tested it on my M1 and the difference in performance with REAPER is definitely due to Anticipate FX processing. When disabled, the efficiency cores decline in usage and the performance cores increase proportionally.
You can’t maintain the delay compensation algorithm required to sync all the audio threads/tracks with their individual latency (due to the different processing and plugins in each chain) spread in parallel across multiple CPU cores running at different frequencies. I hope this makes sense 😅
Same for games and other monolithic applications that require to maintain a coherent synced rendering for their purpose. These sub-performance cores are good to run small system processes in a multitask environment (like the OS itself) or for some apps that can use non-synced parallel processing for sub tasks. I don’t know Reaper but it seems that they figured out a way to run a specific sub-loop of their code for the feature you are referring to in these E-cores.
Same on the Windows/PC side, last gen AMD 7950x gives Ableton Live more headroom than Intel 13900k because AMD has “all cores same speed” versus Intel that has performance/efficient cores like Apple silicon.
James, thanks for your great content, I got all the info I was searching for to choose a Mac setup I’m forced to add to my studio for an “iOS only” app. 👍🏻
🔥NEW UPLOAD!
🖥The Ultimate M1/M2 Mac Buying Guide for Music Production (2023):
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Excellent video and very realistic testing methods! Well done! I’ll stick with my M1 Max MacBook Pro, as I’m quite happy with it 😁
Excellent test. Love your methodical approach 👍🏼
Great video! You're definitely filling a gap on this platform, thanks!
I purchased a M2 Pro Mac Mini last year and the performance has been far poorer than I expected. I wish I'd seen your videos before buying that M2 Pro. Your videos are extremely helpful! Thanks!!
Great value for someone just starting their research: Thanks!
Thank you for actually putting a REAL chain plugin for mastering or mixing as supposed to stock EQ and compressor with 200+ tracks 😂
I understand UA-camrs who are not in the space do this but your video has been the most realistic!
Haha, I appreciate your kind words!! The reason I started doing these Mac videos for music production was that back then I noticed no one was testing the computers properly for music production.
The reviews were always mostly focused on video and coding, and when it comes to music production, the one test many channels used was trying to see how many tracks of synthesizer Logic can load. I was like, "damn that doesn't show us ANYTHING" haha
@@JamesZhan right on the money, James. I look forward to more of your reviews, May it be music, Mac, gear, etc. thanks again!
Really great and real life production exemples (the master bus one). Thanks
It's not just the sample libraries that use up a lot of RAM. Plugins too. This is probably due to modern GUIs. For example try loading something like an Arturia Jupiter 8V on a 5k Apple Studio Display with 120% scaling. You'll be shocked to learn it uses 1.1GB of RAM. It's nuts. Something like U-he Diva uses about 180MB by comparison and something like Tal J-8 even less at 80MB. It gets even more interesting with how plugins manage themselves in relation to memory. If you close the GUI in the DAW the RAM usage generally goes down as well. Some DAWs are also better than others. Bitwig for example, as much as I love it, is a RAM hog compared to say Logic. Empty project in Logic sits at about 358MB Ram. Bitwig and its various components sit at nearly 2GB for an empty project. All that said, on a M1 macbook air with 16GB ram I was able to create a project that loaded every single kit Logic has plus 2 producer kits with multi outs. That's 22 kits if I remember correctly. I also loaded three of the Logic pianos (the Bosendorfer, the Steinway and the Yamaha grand). About 10 electronic multi out kits. Upright ballad bass. Upright studio bass. Fingerstyle and Liverpool basses. Each of these with their respective preset channel strips. Basically I just used the Logic library to load presets onto a channel. The above was about 135 tracks total and who knows how many plugins per channel strip. Usually about 4 but the average might be a little lower. Certainly well over a couple of hundred plugins though. Logic memory usage was 9.82GB.
If you can live with stock Logic plugins I think a 16GB notebook is more than enough. Kontakt and other samplers are a different story obviously. Memory behaviour gets even more interesting though. Just swapping between different views in Logic impacted memory. Arranger window would sit at 358MB at idle but toggle the mixer view and RAM usage drops to 328MB of Ram. I was shocked at how much RAM some plugins used though. Softube and Arturia for example are some of the worst offenders. It's probably to do with their photo realistic UI. Anyway this is just to say there are some complex behaviours to be observed and be mindful of when it comes to RAM usage with respective DAWs and plugins. It's not just the sample libraries but they are the worst offenders I guess.
Super useful tests and information. Thank you!
Very thorough. Thank you for taking the time to do these tests.
Wow, very good tests. Thank you very much!
Your opinion and this content is really helpful. I really appreciate that!
No it’s under settings by default it’s not using all cores. You can force it to use efficiency cores as well.
Great video! Very helpful. Thank you!
First, congratulations! Your tests are the best for music production!
Next, a request: Please make a test focused on the base MBA (8 Gb RAM/256 GB RAM). I can imagine a lot of people, like me, that produce music at home studios, generally with one or two amp sims, a drum and a keyboard VST loaded. Would the base model mac be enought to handle this basic/intermediate use?
Other test that would help a lot of people would be compare mac vs windows performances with similar specs. I am particularly interested in RAM use comparisons.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for such an amazingly detailed review In simplest way! 👍
Nice one!, Thanks for using Ableton Live in your test!
Excellent audio review of the machines, thank you. And very wise words at the end.
As a note, I wish I could remember where from, i read in Logic pro, it can run more efficiently at lower buffers, 128 and below. I’m trying this now with current projects, admittedly not as massive as your tests, and it is working well on a M1 Max chip.
This is the most helpful video on which Mac I purchase ever
Bought a Mac Mini M2Pro from Apple Eaton Center, except for a system shutdown, everything runs extremely smooth, much better than my old MacBook i9...
I also bought my Mac at Apple Eaton Center! Small world haha. System shutdown? That sure sounds weird, but I'm glad your experience has been mostly positive!
Hey! Very nice video. One question... my iMac 27" (2019) is maxing out with bigger projects (Ableton). It's an Intel i5 (3.0 GHz) with 64GB RAM. The RAM is not the problem here. I think 32GB would actually be more than enough. I think it's more about the CPU itself...
If I want to upgrade which is better?
1. MacBook Air M2 16/512
2. MacBook Pro M2 Pro 16/512
I'm using very CPU intense plugins from iZotope (Ozone 11), Kontakt, Farbfilter etc... is the Air M2 enough or should I go with a M2 pro?
Thanks in advance...
The Beatles made the Sgt. Pepper's album on two 4 track machines. My 2019 first gen i9 Macbook, 32 gig of RAM, can load 160 instances/tracks of Kontact playing every articulation of 6 different Spitfire libraries simultaneously. You can get a really clean 2019 Macbook for $1000 and if you need more tracks than that you might be doing something wrong.
Thank you for this in depth review
Wow man! Excellent video, currently strugling with Logic no using all cores in my M1 max, that is not good
i'm on a i9 9900K currently.
I've been thinking about upgrading to and m2 pro , sure about the better performances.
My th-u (ultra oversampling) count is 564 track opened without problems.
This result discourages me a bit about changing the hardware, I thought it might be a better upgrade
Whatever you want to buy just don't buy Apple products like M1 and M2. Go for the Intel 12700H with 14 cores. It's massive
To choose the number of processing threads Logic Pro uses:
Choose Logic Pro > Settings (or Preferences) > Audio.
Click the Processing Threads pop-up window, then choose an option. The options available depend on the number of CPU cores in your Mac and if your Mac supports Hyper-Threading.*
Click Apply.
Please see the pinned comment. I did choose the maximum of cores before testing.
@@JamesZhan Sorry I completely missed that
@@bigsean6045 no worries! I should have included that in the video.
and on ableton Live?
This is a great comparison, thorough and to the point. I had very similar results with my M2Pro Mini and was surprised to see that in almost every music related test, the M1Max chips was either more powerful or made better use of the overall resources even with the M2pro's higher clock speeds. I really wanted to keep our M2Pro mini, as I love the form factor, but ended up returning it for an M1 Max Studio and couldn't be happier as it literally tears through heavy tracks counts and huge plugin stacks. All with zero fan noise or heat in a critical listening environment. And the M2Pro got hot...like HOT!
Im looking to buy the new M2 Max for Music production, you're saying the M1 turned out a better option for you?
@@booq5559 In our heavy projects, side by side, the real world performance of both were VERY similar, less than 5% difference most of the time. But the Mini got a lot hotter for a LOT longer, like most overclocked CPU setups. The Studio was literally room temp at full loads for hours on end. The sustained crazy high thermals on the M2 max will definitely yield a shorter overall lifespan. Judging from the frequency of Apple's new releases, planed obsolescence may be deliberate on their part.
Quite an objective view, thank you so much
Hello, will M2 pro macbook be enough for live band recording? Like Live drums, live bass, live guitar, live keyboard etc.
great video! Thanks!
Why didn’t you assess the M2 pro 12 core? Has 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores? Would perform better than M1 Pro with 10 core.
Thank you, James!
thanks for the review man! Much appreciate
one of the best videos outta there
Hey James Zhan,
Really appreciate your testing and explanations in your videos on M series chips, it’s been super helpful.
Are you doing a video + testing of M3 chips? Also can you please include Studio One in your future testing? 🙏🏻
Thanks for the testing man.. if you want to upgrade from 2012 intel macbook pro, is it better to get m1 pro or m2 pro? Both will be based model..
I would say get M1 Pro and upgrade either the SSD or the RAM.
Does Mac have any NVMe gen 5 comparable storage or is it all gen 4? Likewise , dose Mac use comparable DDR5 or DDR4? Thanks for the awesome informative video!
Absolutely fantastic video.
I'm ever in overload system with my m1 macbook air 8gb ram / 256 ssd. I really need more power, maybe I buy a macbook pro m1pro 16 gb ram or maybe a Macmini m1 16 gb of ram. I must decide...
I'd love to see an update on this since Nolly just got the native silicon update!
Great stuff man!
Very very good test! I suggest an upgrade that no one have done yet. Test acustica audio plug in , in particular sienna hog simulation + diamond eq + lift 3 + ash
Thank u for this review ! 💗
Thank's for this video, I wish you the best ! 🙂
Thanks for watching. I wish you the best too!
Hi James would like to know your opinion about Live looping (low latency) and which CPU performs better for that ?
M2 Pro 3480 MHz ? M1 Max 3200 Mhz ? M2 Air ?... Also I have some concerns about the newer models since I can get refurbished of M1 Max around the same price
Hi James! great job as always! I plan to buy a Mac Studio Max either with 64 GB RAM or with 96GB RAM. My reasoning is that I plan to work with many VIs. Should I choose the one with the more RAM? thank you!!! Keep Up the good work. Many thanks again for your time! all the very best, Kostas
I use Ableton Live as my only DAW - Does this mean that an M2 air with 4 performance cores will give me half the performance of the M2 Pro with 8 performance cores / M1 with 8 performance cores? Are you able to guess the likely % increase in cpu power when using ableton live? I'm trying to decide between M2 15 inch air 8 core, M2 16 inch pro 12 core and, M1 16 inch Pro 10 core.
Thanks for the informative video! I wonder if REAPER is using the efficiency cores for Anticipative FX Processing? Perhaps someone could turn it off in the preferences on a project and see if the efficiency core usage goes down. This might indicate whether using the efficiency cores is something open to other DAWs in the future or not, since most DAW dev teams have sworn off the “pre-processing” approach.
really well done!
Great video. Thanks
I'm thinking about a M2 pro 8gb/256 for music production and work. But today I have a normal PC with Intel core i9 and 16GB RAM. Does it worth the change? (Both are the same price, so if I sell my PC I will be able to buy the macbook).
Less but better. Love there are no fans on the M2 air. This is critical for the production environment I'm in.
Do your mics seriously pick up fan noise from your Mac 🤔 I always thought I needed cooling
@@mitchmcturtle6890 Yes, and thermal regulation is possible without fans.
@@g.o.9513 I’m more of a songwriter that tries to write and record kinda like a mad scientist, and I will often have my laptop and everything on for hours, sometimes even all day just coming and going as I feel inspired. Do you think I should still stick with the pro because I use some intense vsts like omnisphere, sd3, native instruments etc. I’d imagine you’re more organized than me and will do a focused session, and then shut it all down within a few hours.
@@mitchmcturtle6890 The gap between the pro and air is inconsequential. More importantly, freezing tracks can enhance your workflow by reducing the need for real-time processing. Once a track is frozen, you can playback, edit, and mix without requiring the CPU to process the frozen track's audio. Freezing tracks helps optimize resource allocation, ensuring a stable and reliable performance during mixing and playback.
Hi James, thanks for your insight by this video.
Have you ever test this m2 with other daw? Like presonus studio one.
I am a studio one user on 2020 i7 imac and plan to upgrade to apple silicon, maybe you can give your thought,
Thank you
YO man I really like your videos, I have watched the Macbook ones many times and your drum library ones over the last couple years as well. This is anecdotal, but I got the M2 Pro 16 inch 16GB with 1TB and I had to return it because Logic ran noticeably worse than my Hackintosh from 2018 that runs Mojave... (i7-8700k). I ended up ordering the M1 Max 16 since I am hoping that Monterey will be a bit more stable than Venura was for me. Time will tell! Thanks for your effort in all of these videos, they're super helpful.
how is your experience now that you upgraded to M1 Max?
@@suzukitaka4470 So far, so good. It is handling my sessions way better and the CPU seems to be having an easy time. Not one crash, and I got crashes a few times an hour on Ventura. I am running Logic in Native mode after validating all the plugins in Rosetta mode like James mentioned
Hey Joey, glad to hear you liked my videos! It's really strange what you experienced. I will say that if you used migration assistant to migrate from your x86 system to Apple Silicon, that might just be the culprit. I have read in multiple forums that migration assistant does not work well for migrating from x86 to ARM.
@@JamesZhan No migration assistant, I just think that my plugins did not play nicely with Ventura, so I got a machine that came with Monterey and it really made a massive difference.
Well am just going to buy a Mac mechine but is a bit confused wether to get the M2 Pro MacBook or go with the M2 pro Mac mini can help me out with chossing the correct one,
Well am a music producer and an audio engineer
You tested for the DAW to complain about track overload instead of testing for how many tracks could actually be played back at settings without failure. Therefore you only tested adding up estimates of plugin compute and not actual CPU metrics while the plugins were running. Logic has settings for utilizing different amounts of cores including all cores (I suspect since you didn't show them you are just using the automatic setting). In practice I'm not sure why would you want to max out your efficiency cores as other processes on your machine have to run and you want to leave some overhead so your audio processing does not hiccup. My anecdotal experience running SD3 AU and 8+ interface inputs across 16x2 outputs on M1 Max studio has been that Reaper seems slightly less resilient to maintaining audio scheduling without glitching than Logic under comparable settings. Generally @ 96K with 64 samples I report no glitches and they are few enough @ 32 samples that I can work. If you want to amplify your parallel processing ability while avoiding dropouts (which will happen long before you max out your cores at any tolerable buffer size for "real-time" monitoring) you will likely find that you will achieve better results spreading the load across multiple DAW instances than trying to support the same amount from a single DAW. More thoroughly though, if you wish to trigger audio from more than one midi device I would not recommend allowing more than 1 CoreMIDI input device to be registered per audio application instance due to the shortcomings in CoreMIDI's underlying IPC mechanism. Under no circumstances am I able to reliably work in a multichannel tracking environment @ 192K on M1 Max Studio.
Do you have the Logic cores set to automatic? If so Logic will ignore the efficiency cores altogether but you can use them by selecting them in the Logic preferences under Processing Threads. Also if you want to get the highest performance out of logic also set the Process Buffer Range to Large this has no effect on latency only it sets the size of the RAM's buffer to disk and is used to compute mixes and effects, but has no effect live inputs. Lastly you should set the multithreading option to playback and live tracks, it is set to playback only as the default due to how x86 intel processors handled audio. x86 Intel CPUs were better at 1 thread per process and multithread recording was not great but was good for playback. But for Apple silicon's RISC architecture multithreaded playback and live tracks is the most efficient option for Logic. Multithreading playback and live tracks will spread a multithread enabled plugin (most modern plugins have this) or live ARM'ed to record inputs across multiple cores to keep single core overloading from happening. Great review by the way an this is great content for the entire audio community!! Cheers!
As mentioned in the pinned comment, processing threads were set to 10 cores. And yes, everything was set to the way you mentioned.
@@JamesZhan Good to know! Oops! I didn't see the pinned comment!! I wasn't trying to be an annoying Logic fanboy troll so I hope it didn't come across as that🤣 LOL!! Cheers!
@@joesalyers Not at all! I should have included that in the video.
Yeeaaaah Reaper rules! That's just one of the reasons I switched from Ableton to Reaper 2 years ago!!!
For one’s money it sounds like switching to Reaper is the best option.
I have a 2017 MacBook Pro (largest screen available)- it’s a 3.1 GHz i7 core processor 1TB 16gb of ram and my Logic Pro session gave me a notification stating “system overload”
I had 16 tracks playing with some plug ins. I believe one of the reasons for this is because I have 16 tracks that are all basically midi tracks but idk
Can you check the performance difference with the Studio One 6?
Im thinking about getting an M2 Pro. My only doubt is on the RAM I should be getting. For an user that uses vst synths and sample libraries like Keyscape or Omnisphere or vst drums is 16 GB ram enough? Or should I be aiming to get the 32 gb ram. Thanks !
32GB might be better, especially if you think you will be using more sample libraries down the road.
@@JamesZhan Thank you very much! Your videos have been of very much help!!
Great video! For someone eyeing an M2 Pro Mac Mini & using a lot of Kontakt libraries, would you recommend paying the extra for 32GB ram?
Yes I think that would be a good idea!
@@JamesZhan Thanks!
Did you do similar testing for Pro Tools and Cubase as well by any chance? Those are the two DAWs I‘m using and I‘ll be upgrading to Apple silicon soon. Thanks!
Yup! I tested those two DAWs in my latest video: ua-cam.com/video/VFpCbT3Rx4Y/v-deo.html
Thank you for this! Audio users are so ignored by most reviewers! Lifesaver.
I have an intel i5 macbook pro and im gonna upgrade to M2. Should I get the M1 instead or stick to M2 pro 16 ram 512ssd?
Hey, liking your channel, one of the few I could find that does tech reviews from an audio perspective.
I'm thinking about upgrading my producing/engineering laptop from a 2019 Razer with an i7 9750H to a 16 inch M1 pro or max with 32 gig of RAM. What are the fans like on yours when under decent load? I've heard these newer macbooks stay near silent most of the time, and although my intel has served me well it has always been on the loud side, even when I'm not doing much at all, which isn't ideal from an audio perspective. I'd appreciate if you could tell me the experience you've had with yours, thanks!
The only times the fans activate are when I'm rendering a complex 4K video (like this one you watched), but even then, it's very, very quiet. I would have to put my ear very close to the computer to hear them. Fan noise is the last thing you will need to worry about with the Apple Silicon MacBooks imo!
Amazing video!
I wish you had done this with the 12 core m2 since it has 8p cores, and I think might have best the m1 max.
Do we need to wait for Apple M3 chipset MacBook Pro or M2 is enough ?
Hey, I can get a MBP 14" M2 Pro 16GB 512GB and MBP 16" M1 Max 32GB 1TB at the same price, after discounts. Which one should I go for? My primary use case is mobile and web development, with multiple chrome profiles and tabs open most of the time.
Thanks
Ableton's threading is really bad. You can try this out: Enable multiple instances. Do a project and fill it plugins up (separate channels)to the point where you start to get drop outs, then remove few to get stable playback. Save the project and launch another instacne and load the same proejct. Magic! There is a good chance that both projects run just fine despite they are on the verge of dropping out on their own :/
may i asked which chip is the best 2024 ?
i want to hear the tracks being reproduced in reaper to see if they are in sync. with latency compensation trickery that daws need to make its weird why logic wasnt able to perform better since apple owns it. also, was the latency the same for all daws? im intrigued.
Wow the M1 Max beat the M2 pro across the board? I just hopped on the internet to do some last minute research before buying a Macbook Pro 16' tomorrow.
Any real-world idea of M2 Max will compete with the M1 Max? I figured the M2 Max would be easily justifiable and now I'm very confused about which to buy.
Well, it makes sense that the 10-core M1 Max beats the 10-core M2 Pro since M1 Max has 2 more efficiency cores.
I'm not sure if M1 Max beats the 12-core M2 Pro chip though.
I don't have the M2 Max, but just by logic I would assume M2 Max has more performance then the M1 Max. It would make no sense if the second gen Max chip didn't outperform the first gen Max chip.
U shouldn't be recording audio files on the internal drive. Use it for apps and sample library.
Sample libs should be external.
Much appreciated sir!👍🏽