It’s been 13 years, time to upgrade

[supersam83]

Hi
I’ve not posted here for a very long time but I hope you can help me make some decisions.

I have been using PT9 on a 2010/11 iMac for the last 13 or so years. I used it just in the home studio with pro tools 8 then 9 and to back up my photos. Needless to say, it’s just given up.

Thus brings us to update time.
My usage is going to be PT - 50 or so tracks of audio, light on the VIs (stock instruments and plugins etc), iTunes library and photo management.

I’m looking to stay with a Mac and particularly looking at the minis. My first question is will I see any significant benefit with the M2pro over the M2. My Second question is that I’ve seen some mention of an upgrade from PT9 to a perpetual PT Studio licence however I can’t find anything definitive on this. Thirdly, I have the 003r as the main interface with an octopre, am I going to be able to get this talking or am i going to need to factor in a new interface into my budget?

Thank you for any help and guidance you can give.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by supersam83

My Second question is that I’ve seen some mention of an upgrade from PT9 to a perpetual PT Studio licence however I can’t find anything definitive on this.

You meed to contact an authorized Avid dealer for this option. That should have been made clear on the Avid store and other places.

Thirdly, I have the 003r as the main interface with an octopre, am I going to be able to get this talking or am i going to need to factor in a new interface into my budget?

You will need a new interface.

To run on an Apple Silicon Mac the 003 would need a device driver ported to Apple Silicon. The 003 family was well out of support before the Apple silicon Macs came along so there was no driver ported to Apple Silicon, and none will be. Rosetta does not help with device drivers/kernel extensions/kexts, they need to be Apple Silicon native and really on any modern mac an interface driver should be using Audio Driver Kit (i.e. user space drivers) and not kexts, but that change won't engineering work to do that won't happen either.

There is no need to purchase the interface from Avid, there are wonderful third party interfaces available from UAD, RME, Apogee, Motu, Audient, Focusrite, Presonus, etc. (and some brands I would not touch). Lots of choices there with ADAT imput that will work with an OctoPre. With my personal bias for vendors being RME , largely because of the quality of their device drivers and overall technical and long-term product support.


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As for question one. Benefit is entirely subjective. All these CPUs will be blazingly faster (assuming everything else is configured/set up correctly) than what you are using today. The Pro has much more capacity than the regular M2. How much that is worth to you and how much cost affects you decision I have no idea.

Be careful as neither memory or internal SSD is upgradable on modern Macs, so err on making sure you configure enough there. Pro Tools uses way way more memory now than you are used to. Think a minimum of 16GB ideally more since it has to last you years. Do not listen to noise online about how an Apple Silicon system uses less memory than an Intel one.

Mac costs are not just CPU type,.. the memory and SSD can be very important here. And the Mac Minis are somewhat configuration constrained by CPU type so you need to factor in multiple dimensions here. And if you configure a high-end Mac Mini the price increases significantly... to the point that the Mac Studio may be a better purchase at the high-end.

If you can afford it configure your system with enough internal SSD to hold macOS, sessions and samples. No need anymore for dedicated audio/session drives, in fact they'll slow things down, you cannot get any storage faster than the very fast internal SSD, so get that large enough if you can afford it. It's also potently a lot less hassle than dealing with multiple external SSD/HDD, including managing third party SSDs (e.g. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=425632)

Make sure you have all third party plugin installers ready to go, and check they all support Apple Silicon *native* so you can run Pro Tools without Rosetta (so less CPU and memory overhead, maybe more reliable).

Do *not* use Migration Assassin (cough Assistant) to move apps, drivers or plugins from your current Mac. You should be installing all those by hand from new installers with Apple Silicon support.

You can migrate user accounts using Migration Assistant if you need to, but folks who understand Mac administration might just be better off just moving those accounts by hand (especially to avoid any pollution/incompatibilities in moving over ~/Library).

Do *not* put user home directories/documents on iCloud.

Follow the systems optimization steps under "help us help you" up the top of each DUC web page, but keep Spotlight enabled, only disable that if troubleshooting problems.

On the new Mac install Pete Gate's free PT Prefs2 program and use that for checking if installed plugins support Apple Silicon native, and for trashing prefs. https://petegates.com/pgptprefs.html

[tope d]

Originally Posted by supersam83

Hi
I’ve not posted here for a very long time but I hope you can help me make some decisions.

I have been using PT9 on a 2010/11 iMac for the last 13 or so years. I used it just in the home studio with pro tools 8 then 9 and to back up my photos. Needless to say, it’s just given up.

Thus brings us to update time.
My usage is going to be PT - 50 or so tracks of audio, light on the VIs (stock instruments and plugins etc), iTunes library and photo management.

I’m looking to stay with a Mac and particularly looking at the minis. My first question is will I see any significant benefit with the M2pro over the M2. My Second question is that I’ve seen some mention of an upgrade from PT9 to a perpetual PT Studio licence however I can’t find anything definitive on this. Thirdly, I have the 003r as the main interface with an octopre, am I going to be able to get this talking or am i going to need to factor in a new interface into my budget?

Thank you for any help and guidance you can give.

Hi there, supersam83!

I found this from sweetwater https://www.sweetwater.com/store/det...ort-for-1-year
Should also be available from other authorized Avid reseller.
You can go to https://www.avid.com/find-a-reseller to find one near you.

Now, the Digi003 is only supported on up to Sierra. You can check https://avidtech.my.salesforce-sites...02-003-Drivers for info on this.

Hope this helps!
Let us know if you have any further questions.

Thank you!

[Darryl Ramm]

Since the OP is in the UK this might help: https://www.thomannmusic.com/avid_pr...pd_renewal.htm

The 003 is only supported up to Sierra on Intel Macs, but since the OP is asking about Apple Silicon Macs, it's not supported at all, and that's primarily not because of the OS version compatibility, it's because of a total lack of Apple Silicon native driver support, the drivers just do not exist.

[supersam83]

Thank you for the replies

I’ve spent a bit of time looking into all of this and I think the Mac Studio looks like a pretty reasonable machine and probably overkill for my needs.

As for the interface business, USB C seems to be pretty standard, I like the price of the Presonus Quantum 2626 and it appears to be thunderbolt, is that likely to give me better performance with the latency over USBC or is it now pretty much the same thing?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Darryl Ramm]

USB-C is a connector type not a communications standard. Both USB 2, 3.1/3.2 Gen 1, Gen 2, etc., Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, and display port video share the same USB-C connector. It makes no sense to compare USB-C and Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt uses/is USB-C. Not every USB-C port supports Thunderbolt, or all versions of USB (the numbers not letters), and so on.

For some manufacturers leveraging the PCIe connection that Thunderbolt provides can give lower latency than USB, with the noted exception of RME, well regarded their overall driver quality, low latency and great long term support who manage to deliver great low latency on USB, including USB 2, and they have videos explaining some of this. RME may also be a little cranky about doing past Thunderbolt 2 products and then having Intel end availability of the chips they were using (I have one of those interfaces, just little reason to run it on Thunderbolt... except using Thunderbolt optical cables). And a warning I am an RME fan boi.

Presonus do achieve impressive low latency using Thunderbolt, and they do so at low cost. And they do make nice stuff at great price points. But they get that low cost in part by not implementing some things, so look at the overall package, this interface does not for example include hardware monitoring or things like USB-class compliance so you cannot say use the interface with an iPad or iPhone (at higher latency) and when/if Presonus stops supporting the driver on your computer setup it will not be usable at all. OTOH the 2626 has ADAT out and in and wordclock out and in, which is just very impressive at that price. Make sure any interface you get has the features, connectivity, etc. you need.


Be careful of chasing latency specs, monitoring latency for many users can be dominated by the HW buffer size and how small that can be set is dependent on the session load, plugin quality/issues, computer performance, audio interface driver quality, workflow including freezing/committing tracks, etc.. There were/are DAW benchmarks that measure latency under simulated DAW workloads but unfortunately nothing standard that uses Pro Tools. Worrying say which interfaces has the best latency at very small HW Buffer sizes may be just totally irrelevant unless you know for your type of use you are likely to be able to use those small HW buffer sizes while tracking. And its the pickup/rerecording, punch-in to fix problems in the mix, that can be the issues, not the initial tracking with the DAW/computer under relatively light load.

OTOH you can use simple latency tests to exclude products with issues and the Avid Mbox Studio looks a mess with not impressive latency, and worse incorrectly reported latency from the driver.

Overall we are spoilt with so many interfaces covering so many features/capabilities/prices. Again, if you look at the options from UAD, RME, Apogee, Motu, Audient, Focusrite, Presonus interfaces you will have a very good picture for what is available with features/capability/price ranges.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by supersam83

Thank you for the replies

I’ve spent a bit of time looking into all of this and I think the Mac Studio looks like a pretty reasonable machine and probably overkill for my needs.

As for the interface business, USB C seems to be pretty standard, I like the price of the Presonus Quantum 2626 and it appears to be thunderbolt, is that likely to give me better performance with the latency over USBC or is it now pretty much the same thing?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I've never used any Presonus Hardware (so take with a grain of salt) But I know two people who use the Quantum 2626 and really like them
IMO pretty hard to beat for under say $1000 to $1500 Especially if you need 6 to 8 mic pre's

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by K Roche

Also note Presonus states the QT 2626 uses Tunderbolt 3 which I understand has almost twice as fast transfer speed of USB-C (now weather you would really notice any difference I do not know)

Again it makes no sense at all to compare USB-C and Thunderbolt.

Transfer speed and latency are measuring different things. Thunderbolt vs USB 3.x speed here is irrelevant, what is relevant is Thunderbolt/PCIe drivers can have low latency if implemented well.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Again it makes no sense at all to compare USB-C and Thunderbolt.

Transfer speed and latency are measuring different things. Thunderbolt vs USB 3.x speed here is irrelevant, what is relevant is Thunderbolt/PCIe drivers can have low latency if implemented well.

OK which is why after thinking on it I deleted that sentence
However note I did not say it was better performance (his question) . I simply stated it has faster transfer speed which it does .. and why I wrote the caveat that weather it was noticeable or not I did not know

[Cstone]

I know the feeling about time. I have been out of the loop so long I can’t get my pro tools to work . USB not recognizing. In 2016 I had a studio fire and I lost all of my music gear. I’m now finally trying to run my 002 and I’m having no luck ☹️