Pro Tools 11 and High Sierra

[Sardi]

Originally Posted by Cartoonguy

The top iMac comes standard with Fusion. The other two models have it as an option. To me, that tells me that Apple fully support this option and that Final Cut should work fine with it. Anyway, as I say, my experience has been just fine.

Hmmmm...

You literally just repeated what I wrote.

Weird.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Cartoonguy]

Hey MusicMan, I appreciate your trying to help here, but you need to calm down. I am not refusing to follow any advice, as you accuse. I asked if anyone has used PT 11 on High Sierra and I have my answer, it will not. End of story. What we have here is a side subject of using a Fusion drive and I have just reported honestly that it works and that Apple have not ditched the concept.

I don't think you do users any favours by using such dramatic language as "death to audio recording" or "whistling past the graveyard" when someone is telling you that it works for them. I have been working with a Fusion drive for four years and never had a problem. Sorry you can't accept that, but some people might find it useful to know that it can work and then choose to act as they wish.

[BusyBoxSt7]

cartoon guy,

since no one explained why fusion drives are a bad idea, I will attempt as straight forward as possible.

SSDs are drastically faster than spinning drives. Their write and read times are drastically faster.
> A fusion drive only contains a portion of SSD. It's designed to give some of the results of an SSD by letting the apps open faster etc.
> Audio (and video) require reading MASSIVE files, often lots of them at a time.
> I can tell you from experience that almost every error message, freeze, and crash in pro tools is NOT from a "cpu overload" that it might tell you. It's that your computer is struggling to read off the drives fast enough. Get an SSD, a 250GB one even and just put the current project on the desktop (yes, the project has to be on the SSD, just using it as a system drive is near useless (relatively speaking) for performance increases for audio/video because it's all about reading those files faster)... I've had outside engineers at my studio trying to do 96 track mixes on their laptops and coming constantly to error messages. I told them to buy an SSD (this was years ago, like 2013 or earlier). They did. Result? 4% disk usage now reported by pro tools and their error messages pretty much disappeared...

But for YOU, even if you're just playing back a few tracks, what you can expect is just much better system response. The sluggishness when you push play will disappear. That isn't just your buffer settings and you may not even realize it. But when I had a Mac Pro with multiple drives (one an SSD), every once in awhile I would open a project off a hard drive and forget I had and wonder why the computer was creeping slow.

Anyway, that's the story.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by BusyBoxSt7

cartoon guy,

since no one explained why fusion drives are a bad idea, I will attempt as straight forward as possible.

SSDs are drastically faster than spinning drives. Their write and read times are drastically faster.
> A fusion drive only contains a portion of SSD. It's designed to give some of the results of an SSD by letting the apps open faster etc.
> Audio (and video) require reading MASSIVE files, often lots of them at a time.
> I can tell you from experience that almost every error message, freeze, and crash in pro tools is NOT from a "cpu overload" that it might tell you. It's that your computer is struggling to read off the drives fast enough. Get an SSD, a 250GB one even and just put the current project on the desktop (yes, the project has to be on the SSD, just using it as a system drive is near useless (relatively speaking) for performance increases for audio/video because it's all about reading those files faster)... I've had outside engineers at my studio trying to do 96 track mixes on their laptops and coming constantly to error messages. I told them to buy an SSD (this was years ago, like 2013 or earlier). They did. Result? 4% disk usage now reported by pro tools and their error messages pretty much disappeared...

But for YOU, even if you're just playing back a few tracks, what you can expect is just much better system response. The sluggishness when you push play will disappear. That isn't just your buffer settings and you may not even realize it. But when I had a Mac Pro with multiple drives (one an SSD), every once in awhile I would open a project off a hard drive and forget I had and wonder why the computer was creeping slow.

Anyway, that's the story.

Let's not forget a few things about fusion drives:
Apple is continually shrinking the size of the ssd portion without telling anyone
Fusion drives also move the data to and from the ssd portion as needed. Nothing is stored permanently on the ssd part. Do you really want the operating system and drive moving data while you're trying to work? I think not.

[BusyBoxSt7]

Originally Posted by Cartoonguy

I asked if anyone has used PT 11 on High Sierra and I have my answer, it will not. End of story...

Did anyone ever actually reply saying they'd tried it and it did not work? Just because someone says, and factually, that it's not supported doesn't mean it won't work. I have a friend running major sessions on sierra (unsupported) and I just installed PT11 on High Sierra 10.13.4. I haven't fully tested it yet by any means, but it does open up, record audio, all looks fine at least.

I suspect it probably has that thing where one of the options to import audio doesn't work right so you have to use the others (El Cap did that). I can't recall which it was but you have to use the menu or have to click and drag the audio files into the playlist or whatever, anyway, just a simple workaround.

These things are also really hit or miss. Some people report that they can't get it to work at all and others are like "no clue what you mean, running fine here".

I eventually plan to upgrade to PT2018, but just doing this temporarily. Might have to downgrade to 10.13.2 ... Supposedly .4 has major CPU issues. But we'll see, I mean, maybe those issues only hit the current version of PT and not 11 (no one knows.. it's untested / unsupported).