New M2 Studio / PT Ultimate / Sonoma

[cmbourget]

Originally Posted by crazy_ow

I'm having no issues with PT Ultimate natively or under rosetta, performance is reduced under rosetta which is to be expected but everything seems to be working as it should.

I'm still waiting for the sonnet TB chassis so hoping everything still plays nicely when that arrives and I start running the HD Native card.



I had to get a new TB UAD Satellite for the studio as I have been using an old FW version, so UAD plugs are the only thing I haven't tested yet.

Glad to hear it. Here too, in native, everything seems to be going well so far, but I haven't set up any big (Atmos) sessions yet.

[innerbooty]

Waiting for my DVI to HDMI adapter to show up so I can plug my crappy old spare monitor into the Studio to start setting it up and find out what OS I have. Anticipating I will be in Rosetta mode, possibly for a long time, because I am sure a bunch of the plugins I use are not silicon-ready yet. Glad to hear Rosetta works well! Later step will be getting HDX and UAD Octo going in the Sonnett. I'm a little nervous about all the hurdles I need to get over to get the new rig going. My current cheesegrater rig is old and dusty, but considering how old it is, I'm actually astound how much I can do, and how reliable it is... I am looking forward to a nice, quiet machine, but I'm afraid most of my nasty fan noise comes from the HDX card. Hopefully I can get the Sonnett far enough away...

[crazy_ow]

Originally Posted by innerbooty

but I'm afraid most of my nasty fan noise comes from the HDX card.

The loudest thing in my control room is the fan in my omni without that this room would be almost silent when the Mac Studio is turned on. I may swap out the fan for a silent one but I've been threatening that for years.......

Tbh the omni should have gone years ago but not mater what converters come in and out of the rack that always manages to stay. It's too convenient when I don't want to fire everything up.

This has just made me realise another oversight and I haven't checked how loud the fan is in the sonnet chassis, so fingers crossed it doesn't sound like its taking off.

[innerbooty]

My DVI to HDMI adapter showed up so I am setting up the new M2 Studio Ultra now. It did come with Ventura, which I am thankful for. Getting ready to download Pro Tools. So - should I do 2023.12, or 2023.9? Is 2023.12 stable enough, or is it one of those releases where Avid broke more things than they fixed? Since this probably won't be my working machine for another couple of months might just go ahead and do 2023.12


Yikes!! Just now seeing Avid's warning about bad firmware upgrades for HDX and HD Native users in 2023.12. It's always somethin'...

[crazy_ow]

Originally Posted by innerbooty

Yikes!! Just now seeing Avid's warning about bad firmware upgrades for HDX and HD Native users in 2023.12. It's always somethin'...

Well spotted... does that mean it's an issue when it's a clean install or just when upgrading?

The avid sites says For Pro Tools HDX or HD Native customers who are upgrading to 2023.12 from a version earlier than 2022.4:

I'll be taking my HD Native card out of a machine that's currently running 2021.12

[innerbooty]

I'm coming from 2021.6, and I am super paranoid about something bad happening to my HDX card every time there's a firmware upgrade. So I played it safe and I've downloaded 2023.9 on the Studio. Scarlett working great, (although it took me a while to figure out why only 44.1K and 48K were showing up). Basic Pro Tools + Avid Plugin Bundle all working well so far. Going to start the slog of installing my 12 zillion other plugins. Ugh...

I have a 1TB internal drive on the M2 Studio. I am assuming all my VI libraries - mostly for Komplete/Kontakt - should go on an external drive. Would welcome any recs on the best, most stable external drive solution for a working drive, not just storage. Looking on OWC now...

[crazy_ow]

I've always had a separate system drive, scratch drive for my PT sessions and my sample drive for sample libraries however after a bit of research last month it would appear I've been stuck in the past and that's not really required anymore to due the speed of modern drives.

I have all my samples libraries VI's etc installed on the internal drive of my Mac Studio and I've bought 4TB NVME and eternal TB4 enclosure for my PT sessions. I cant believe how fast the external drive is! I'm getting speeds around 2700mbps from it.

[innerbooty]

I've had separate drives for all those things as well. And moving the VI libraries to the system drive makes sense, now that the new computers can handle it. My only hitch is that I got the M2 Ultra 64GB, 1TB internal drive, and my VI library is already over 1TB. So I'm definitely going to need an external solution. I'm seeing 2TB TB4 NVMe external drives being $450+. Yowza! I should probably spring for that for my Pro Tools drive, but does the VI library drive need to be TB4? So much stuff to figure out in this transition. And then there's the whole Sonnett HDX / UAD Octo part, that I'm not really looking forward to...

[Harris Pepsi]

Hi everyone. I've been following this thread for a while cos I am doing exactly what crazy_ow is doing, almost from the same configuration. Waiting for the Mac Studio Ultra 2, 128GB 2TB to get here in 3 days, and the chassis al well.

I've spent weeks working on projects during daytime and nights trying to sort things out before I spend tons of cash on something that could easily be the worst nightmare ever. The chassis will be here tomorrow. We will see how it turns out.

Thanks to Innerbooty for the heads up on the firmware upgrades issue. I can swear that thing was not there a couple of days ago. May be my ADHD meds are failing on me. I saw the post yesterday just before I was going to bed and it made me spend an hour more awake.

As far as I understand, coming from PT11 HD Native PCIe, I could get my card bricked. It's completely ridiculous how in 2024 getting things done, specially paying tons of cash on expensive equipment, something can go wrong big time in a split second.

The info about the AVID chassis is also pretty confuse. I'm sure many of you have spent hours looking for information everywhere, even under your bed.

If it helps you or someone else, I'm linking the chassis manual down below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nndhedmtdy...Guide.pdf?dl=0

As soon as the party begins in my studio I'll be updating any relevant information. Apple Japan told me twice it will, without doubt, ship with Sonoma. Fingers crossed, but customer service in Japan is way more better than in the US or other countries. So I guess I'll be a lab rat for a while.

Just for the record, I'm not a native English speaker. If I make any mistake it's likely to due to my ADHD than a language barrier. I was born in Spain and moved to Japan when I was 19. I've been living in Japan ever since, so if you do the math you can guess my age. My name is obviously not Harris. That's an alias I use when I have to put my name on a project I don't want to be related with.

Being customer service so good here, I hope I can shine a light on this thread from the other side of the world.

Party on!

[crazy_ow]

My sonnet finally turned up today! I in the middle of a project I hope to get tied up tomorrow and then I'm going to take the leap of faith and migrate.

Before I do I really need to figure this warning about bad firmware upgrades for 2023.12 users.

Originally Posted by Harris Pepsi

As far as I understand, coming from PT11 HD Native PCIe, I could get my card bricked.

Did you find anymore info on this Harris?