2020.3 Mac 5,1

[off the wall]

If you’ve got a metal capable GPU, Mojave is the way to go with a 5,1 IMO.

[stargazer]

Upgraded to macOS 10.13.6 and PT 2020.3
Seems to be without issues, so all’s good for now.
Thanks a lot for your opinions and help!

[nigelpry]

I haven’t posted in a long time, but do lurk from time to time to see what’s going on. I bought several years worth of support plans before the price doubled so ok until autumn 2021.

Anyway, just wanted to add a few comments re Cheesegrater Mac Pro and 2020.3, particularly my experience with it so far. Mine is a 4.1 updated to 5.1 with new processors, mobo and ram.

First off, I’m on Mojave 10.14.6 and it is running very well for me. High Sierra was ok, Sierra was better, and Mojave has been very good for me.

I got an Nvidia Quadra K5000 for Mac second hand several years ago, and thankfully it is supported to give the option key boot menu, which is vital for me.

Why vital? Well I have installed the TitanRidge Thunderbolt 3 pci-e card, which gives me fully working thunderbolt on my cheesegrater. I use thunderbolt to connect my Apollo Silver Firewire (with thunderbolt card), which in turn has my Apollo x4 connected. I recently upgraded to the x4 from my previous Apollo Twin mk11, for the extra mic pres, and for ADAT out as well as in (the Twin only had ADAT in).

I can say, happily, that the Apollos are rock solid in all three daws I use (Pro Tools, Logic Pro X and Cubase 10.5, also Wavelab 10 that I use for mastering.

The only complexity is that for this to work I have to have a dual boot system with a Windows partition. I am running Windows 10. When booting from cold, I have to boot into windows. This first boot activates the TitanRidge thunderbolt card, which recognises the presence of the two Apollo devices, but this happens too late for the Apollo drivers to recognise them and activate them.

I then have to warm reboot into windows a second time, at which point the Apollo window drivers correctly recognise the Apollo devices and activate them for use in windows.

At this point I warm reboot into MacOS, and miraculously, the Apollo Mac drivers recognise that the Apollos are connected and activate them for use in MacOS.

The behind the scenes magic relates to the fact that the TitanRidge card retains information about what is connected to it, along with some low level (driver I guess) config data when the computer is warm rebooted, as opposed to cold booted.

It’s a few minutes of pain when first booting from cold, but then the system stays totally solid. To be honest, I often leave the cheesegrater booted up for days on end anyway, so its only an occasional few minutes of delay when going through this boot process.

In case you are wondering, this works with Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave, and with Windows 7 and 10. Those are the OSes I’ve used with it. I never tried Windows 8 but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work.

And by the way, I also have my pro audio software loaded onto the Windows partition, and it runs very well there too, from the admittedly limited testing I’ve done.

In a final quirk and massive bonus, when in MacOS and first loading up Pro Tools, with an empty project loaded, I set my playback engine to my aging Digidesign 003 console. I then change my playback engine to Apollo Thunderbolt, which saves and closes the project, then reopens it with the Apollo as the playback engine.

Why? Well the amazing quirky magic that happens when I do this is that the control surface part of the 003 remains active. So I have audio passing via the Apollo Thunderbolt devices, but ALL the 003 control surface faders, knobs and buttons still working, including transport, jog/shuttle, etc. I can add and remove inserts, and edit plugin parameters, also add remove and adjust sends. This quirk does not work in windows, I’ve tested to see and sadly not.

While Mojave is as far as the Mac Pro will go officially, I have heard rumours that there is a fix to allow Catalina to be installed. I won’t look into that until the day comes that some software update that is important to me requires it.

Thankfully UA’s Luna (V1 at least) will run on Mojave, according to ehat Drew has posted up on the UAD forum.. Time will tell how far that software matures before UA drops Mojave support. Luna has great potential for Apollo owners with its hardware integration into the DAW, so I have fingers tightly crossed that it matures nicely while still supporting Mojave.

With 2x 6-core 3.46ghz processors, 64gb ram, SSD OS and recording drives, and separate HDD spinners for plugin and sample libraries, I aim to keep my cheesegrater alive and kicking for as long as possible!

One other annoying quirk ... I have 2x MidiSport 8x8 and 2x MidiSport 4x4 usb devices to provide connections to my midi hardware.

When booting into windows, I can have no more than 1x MidiSport device connected, otherwise it simply crashes and reboots. So I bought a usb3 hub that has individual power switches for each usb port, and have a post-it note stuck on my 003 to remind me to switch the 3 other MidiSport devices off before booting into windows.

If I am staying in windows I can power up the MidiSport devices once boot up has completed (after the warm reboot) and all 4 devices work fine. If I am rebooting into MacOS then I leave them switched off until MacOS is loaded, then switch them on and again all devices are recognised and work fine.

This is because the last windows driver for the MidiSport devices is for windows 7, and the last driver for MacOS is for Mountain Lion!

But those Mountain Lion drivers still work in Mojave, and the Windows 7 driver works in Windows 10 as long as the extra devices are only connected after boot up. You can only have one MidiSport attached during bootup.

Hope this info is of usevto some cheesegrater users out there ;-)

[JFreak]

Hi Nigel, so nice we didn't lose you for good

[nigelpry]

You’re just trying to suck me back in ;-)

[clivvy]

jfreak your such a wise guy!