M1 compatibility roadmap?

[atticmike]

When do you think Avid will release their native version of Pro Tools for Apple Silicon, given that Apple themselves have already managed to provide a fully functioning candidate at launch?

Avid is sadly known for slacking on releasing new features and necessary updates to their software so my gut feeling tells me 2022.

In which case I'll switch to Logic Pro since the only thing that keeps me right now in Pro Tools is familiarity and loyalty.

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[Ben Jenssen]

Who knows?
I've let the "update/support plan" expire.
My thinking is that this is not the time to make decisions/transitions on hw/sw, because there are so many unknowns these days.
I'd be very surprised if Avid made a M1 native version of PT this year.
So, since I have a system that works OK for me, I'll just stay with Catalina and PT2020 and look forward to PT native for apple silicon in a year or two*:
PT2022/M2, fantastic performance, low latency native, not too expensive, and I guess I'll be going to subscription then.

*Provided I'm lucky enough to be still alive.

[atticmike]

Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen

Who knows?
I've let the "update/support plan" expire.
My thinking is that this is not the time to make decisions/transitions on hw/sw, because there are so many unknowns these days.
I'd be very surprised if Avid made a M1 native version of PT this year.
So, since I have a system that works OK for me, I'll just stay with Catalina and PT2020 and look forward to PT native for apple silicon in a year or two*:
PT2022/M2, fantastic performance, low latency native, not too expensive, and I guess I'll be going to subscription then.

*Provided I'm lucky enough to be still alive.

I think the biggest issue that they aren't developing anything in-house, have to have it made by a third party and mainly just market their product while Apple has a dedicated team for logic for example. Slate Digital is the same, mainly Marketing and anything they have is made by someone for them.

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[atticmike]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Avid seems to have some bodies in house still. But not many, they decimated the development orgs years ago. The lucky folks seemed to end up at places like UAD, cough,... clearly showing it's impossible for a focused company to build great products in the audio industry. But lots of stuff now seems outsourced. And I suspect you can see the quality lines there with new stuff like Cloud Collaboration and Avid Link I suspect largely developed by outsource provider GlobalLogic. And there is so much just wrong/broken with that stuff and has been for a long time that's it's an embarrassment. Avid likely can't abandon the broken cloud collaboration or Pro Tools first silliness, that would be too much to admit to, and too much to loose claim to investors of having so much "cloud" business/users.

I just wish Avid would junk all the awful crap and wasted effort and focus on core Pro Tools quality and compatibility, and oh maybe providing ongoign product support and driver updates for products they are supposed to be supporting. I'd start by finding the folks internally who wanted to do all this junk and accepted it being so awful and can't or won't clean it up and walk them out the damn building.

I just renewed my support plan, but I'll give Avid the chance of getting native Apple/Arm support in this cycle and if not I'll likely give up. There are too many companies developing good well supported DAWs to keep putting up with Avid.

Yup, I agree. Well, they'd have to put a team inside their company together again because companies such as Presonus, Ableton or Apple outpace them with features. I mean, how long did it take them to implement folders in their daw which has been a standard feature in others for nearly a decade?

Also, as an active developer nowdays, you already know how ARM works given the rise of Pro-Apps on iPads for the past few years and it doesn't seem to be such a problematic port if you have talented devs.

Fabfilter and Valhalla already released native versions of their plugins (Waves is probably going to also follow suit very soon) and the reason why I think it is very critical to make your products available on ARM now because it has a tremendous single core performance which in audio applications enables it to outpace even the flagship 8 core Intel MacBook Pro and by observing the second hand market, you see that even right now, many Intel MacBook 2019 owners are selling their Laptop for half the price just to buy the M1 Macbook Pro because even in Rosetta, it is very desirable.


The sad truth is just that Avid is probably going to be the last company to release their M1 version right now.

Even Eventide's H9000R effects racks run on ARM now.

In the past, I was very dependant on Pro Tools due to plugins such as Lo-Fi, sansamp or Dave Hill's but now, there are better options out there which surpass Avid's offerings.

Although I obviously keep Pro Tools just to transfer seasons from clients but won't update it anymore.

I'll get my M1 Pro and will do a shootout on Logic with Fabfilter and Valhalla vs Pro Tools with the same plugins on my 9900KS running at 5.1 GHz and post it here.

I also noticed that Acustica runs terribly on Pro Tools compared to Studio One or Ableton with unmanageable CPU spikes when used in large numbers.

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[Bob Olhsson]

Avid has always had a much higher bar for official Pro Tools "support" than other developers. I think I've used a "supported" computer for less than a third of the time since I started running Sound Designer 2 on my SE-30.

[atticmike]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

Avid has always had a much higher bar for official Pro Tools "support" than other developers. I think I've used a "supported" computer for less than a third of the time since I started running Sound Designer 2 on my SE-30.

That's a long time ago my friend and a completely different company compared to now.

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[rssoundinc]

Originally Posted by atticmike

I also noticed that Acustica runs terribly on Pro Tools compared to Studio One or Ableton with unmanageable CPU spikes when used in large numbers.

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Very strange experience with the M1 MacBook Pro I bought in January. Obviously there's conventional wisdom which is to not change your setup or upgrade until it's proven to work. However, amazingly, reputable people jumped on the bandwagon almost immediately, running and posting their own bench tests and reporting glowing results. I, myself, was actually surprised when pretty much everything I had - the Slate bundle, Plugin Alliance bundle, Fabfilter bundle, dozens of UAD - worked right out of the box.

I began to notice some discrepancies and little quirks for which I found workarounds; when using with an Apollo x8, Pro Tools would need a reboot when changing sample rates from 48 to 96; the UAD SSL wouldn't recall some of the time, rendering it unreliable for use with client sessions; otherwise, everything had been fine for the last four or five months since I bought it and semi-retired my original 2017 MacBook Pro 15" retina I7. (As a side note: Acustica plugins flat out don't behave - but this was the problem on my 2017 MacBook Pro as well. I'm about ready to sell the $1200 worth of plugins I bought from them because, even though they are truly amazing sounding plugins, the headache from using them is not worth my time).

Puzzlingly. and seemingly apropos of nothing, in just the last few days, the Pro Tools setup has become unstable. Recalls open with CPU spikes that render the session unplayable. I thought I had narrowed it down to the incorporation of one or two plugins which were causing the problem, but, in fact, it's gotten worse. Some Plugin Alliance favorites - Amek EQ 200 - seem to be causing the instability. Additionally, graphics redraws on PA stuff randomly switches window size. Worse, newly acquired plugins that are said to be M1 compatible like Karzog True Dynamics and K3 Clipper seem to not play well with the other "unauthorized" plugins when utilized on the same track - they will work when instantiated during a mix session but, on recall, cause the session to be unplayable with the CPU meter red at 100%.

I understand that Apple caught developers off guard last September when unexpectedly announcing the M1 chip. I'm just a live sound and studio mixing engineer and prefer to focus on working instead of endless technical semantics. The reason I bought in in the first place is that I had actually hoped the M1 would make the Acustica plugins actually usable, but instead, the complete opposite has happened. Now, out of nowhere, I have been dealing with system instability for the last four days straight.

It used to be one could get a feel for the idiosyncrasies of a system and work around it. Now, it seems we're up the creek without a paddle and all the developers - from Slate to Avid, Universal Audio and others are not only not happy about it, we're looking at another 6 months to a year or more before this even begins to become resolved. It would be great if the companies kept an open dialogue regarding the progress of the task of making these programs and plugins compatible; the fact that there is practical radio silence from the majors is daunting. What about the fee I pay every year to keep my PT version current? Is Waves going to ask me for yet another upgrade fee to the dozens of plugins I already own just to be compatible with the new machine? I can see where this is going, and it's not good.

If anybody knows of a forum where users like myself who made the leap can communicate and keep a running list of known issues and general camaraderie, that would be great. I don't need a smart ass saying "see! you should have waited!" That's disingenuous in this case, especially with so many in the pro audio community hyping this out of the box.

Cheers and good luck! :)

[Rectifried]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

Avid has always had a much higher bar for official Pro Tools "support" than other developers. I think I've used a "supported" computer for less than a third of the time since I started running Sound Designer 2 on my SE-30.

Many times in my avid journey I have bought everything according to their website including their very expensive hardware and done cleaning stall, everything correctly and still get stupid error messages out of the blue… The last cluster F was my Mac trashcan running Big Sur… Everything was up to spec I never use Wi-Fi and yet the mouse became sluggish black bars appeared on the screen a lot of the problems seem to be graphics related even though the Mac Pro 12 core has a decent graphics card…
After a week of time lost diddling with it I crawled back to Catalina .
and it was normal with all predictable errors…
But seeing how the wind was blowing I jumped over to M1
after following all the rules and having such a bad time I figured why the hell not every point update from .10 2.12 I thought was going to fix it but like a bad marriage it only broke other things, Things even like a tab to transient

I figured I’d sell the trash Can before it really falls off a cliff value wise… Using an M1 16 GB memory laptop as a stop gap is great since I know I’ll end up using it as a normal laptop if I ever jump over to a larger mini… But at this point I’m a little burnt out

[Bob Olhsson]

You aren't alone but the competition is as bad or worse.