I’ve watched so many videos about the M1 without feeling any real confidence behind purchasing it for music production. Thank you for making this video! I think an M1 Mac Mini is going to be a big step up from my 2016 13” MBP for performance. Solid video!
finally a decent benchmark review of M1 for musicians and producers out there, thanks for doing this man. really appreciate it! I just got my new M1 with 16GB memory and 512 GB storage, hopefully I won't have to upgrade for a few years🤞
Excellent video! Exactly what I was looking for a few weeks ago and did not find anything on RU-vid that goes that deep in comparing different music production workflows with M1, so that video is spot on!
Hey man thank you so much for taking the time to make this video! There definitely aren’t nearly enough users out there posting such relevant information. I appreciate it!
Bought the M1 a couple of months ago with 16 gb ram and 1 tb hard drive I run Ableton Live (albeit on Rosetta 2). Have not had an issue with any plugins - almost all of them are compatible (even if the website says they are not). Haven’t looked back since I got it.
I've got the m1 pro 16" macbook and seeing this real world performance shows me that if u organize ur projects enough there's no way you'll get a memory bottleneck. great video !
That's amazing! I'm using a hackintosh right now (i7-9700, 16gb RAM, 2TB HD) and seriously thinking about switching to the M1. Your video was perfect! I produce basically everything you covered on this video metal, orchestral, EDM and use almost every plugin you tested.So thank you a lot!
I’ve been looking for this video for a long time. I’ve never had 100 instances of the same Omnisphere patch playing the same midi 😂. Yet I’ve seen countless videos like that. Thanks for this.
Thank you for being the first person to finally think of real world music production scenarios especially when it comes to latency. I have 2 UA interfaces so that helps not having to worry as much but Native Instruments is NOT jiving with the new 16” M1 Pro. I think it’s an issue with Monterey. Even when you’re only using 7% CPU, when you switch presets or stop the audio you get loud clicks and pops. Massive X will continually play a note when you hit stop a track so it’s unusable at the moment. Graduating from the 13 inch M1, I’ve been able to use Massive X for only 3 months and only was Big Sur, not Monterey.
Best video benchmarking everything I’m interested on m1. Thanks for the good work. So many people are simply duplicating midi tracks, that’s pretty useless on its own.
Matt, amazing video and FINALLY, something with straight up Spitfire examples. I’m running a M1 MBAir with 16GB and because I’m a teacher, haven’t even had a chance to install my UAD software for my interface. I was really thinking of going with a new MBP with the M1 Pro 512SSD and 16GB and was going back and forth between 8 cores and 10 cores.
Great video :D Been looking at maybe getting an M1 device, and this definitely helped me get a better idea of what to expect if I take the plunge! Both on paper and from your tests it looks like a silent sustained-load beast, which is exactly what I want from a music production machine c: Thank you so much for putting good info out in the world ^^
Great video! Thanks. Might I suggest take the first workflow after a 8GB RAM DISK to mimic an 8GB Mac Mini. I am surprised by how many people claim it enough for Ableton. Thanks !
Excellent video! You hit the nail on the head with the lack of benchmarking for audio users. Here are my thoughts...16GB is a great start and should work well but I think 32GB will be the new standard in the next 2-3 years. I currently have a 2018 Mac Mini i7 with 32GB of memory and I can say Logic loves having some room. I had a project with about 70-80 audio tracks, 20 Virtual instruments and well over 100 plugins. It worked fine with 16GB but when I upgraded the memory to 32GB, I noticed the Mini was using a total of 20GB of memory. With the 16GB unified memory on the M1, it will start using swap memory (your SSD) which is not ideal in terms of performance. Give the macOS 32GB and suddenly it can throw more into memory and not use your swap memory. I should also say I feel Logic has more overhead in terms of memory/CPU usage. I used to record/mix with Reaper and I felt it was more efficient. I started using Logic since my friends were more familiar so I moved over to it. Just my two cents and great job on the video!
I Absolutely love this video!!! you totally hit the gap that is on youtube. Everyone do benchamrks that are kinda useless in real life of music producers. I was looking for this kind of a video since I began thinking about buying new mac computer. One little thing that was unlucky for me is that I am looking for a MacBook Air or Pro and not mac mini. But I think it doesn't matter since it has the same processor and RAM that I was looking for in the MacBooks so I guess it still fits my case. Thank you so much for this review, I can't express how much it helped me. Just so you know I am making EDM Music and the fact that you did include this sight in the video means the world to me. Thank you!!!
Thanks for a great video for music folk! I did watch other music videos as I figure out which Mac to upgrade to next. An interesting fact in one was to lessen the load on the CPU, the person switched to doing everything in Rosetta rather than both. The computing of translating back and forth the plug ins that were not M1-compatible used a lot of CPU, so just working in one environment made a difference. Check it out. Once I get an Apple Silicon Mac, I’ll be testing that out as well.
Thanks for doing a proper review. I can't stand the "OMG THIS RUNS 1000 tracks with VERB". Oh great, what happens when I have 8 neural DSP tracks that I'm recording plus an 8 minute complex MIDI multri drum track, plus VSTs and instruments... But you did the proper thing instead of the lazy thing, and actually went through it for multiple real use case scenarios. Thanks for that and never apologize when you didn't do anything wrong :)
You didn’t tell us the specs of your M1, or did I miss it while listening to it shaving? This was a good idea. I could hear the Steely Dan influence in the guitar part. Adding a singer would be a nice next step.
What this guy said at the beginning is 100% true… an what he said bout “how many tracks” is also true…how i wish this guy was using logic pro, just to be exactly where im at right now.. im getting a lot of error messages in Logic that i have to figure out… anyway, good job man!
A good rule of thumb for anyone in any genre: bounce your synthesized instruments and VST effects. You can always save the patches and go back and do another take. If you’re hitting performance issues, this should always be your first go to. Logic has a handy “freeze” function that basically does this in the background. Not sure if Ableton does too?
Quite nice review on apple m1 machine!! The project you produced is defiantly a more "real world" scenario for people to consider their choice. Thanks a lot!
Man.. This is , hands down, one of the best videos on this subject, I have seen , so far. And I have watched a LOT of them. Its August 2022 now.. Have you been able to try kontakt in Native Apple Silicon ? I've been postponing getting the M1 Mini because I tried one for the 14 days, during the last Christmas Holidays....and I was not 100% convinced..namely when it came to RAM. I am normally running 8 to 20 tracks, in a live looping multi-instrument Setup. (also with software guitar amps&fx like u) Or, I am just using Orchestral VSTs.. Because I am a percussionist....latency is of most importance.. but also...the opportunity/possibility of running several tunings of the same instruments in different muted channels, and also several instances of kontakt in the same channel. channel...simultaneously. Do you think the M1 Mini might be able to handle it, now...running natively ? I use Ableton for the live looping multi-inst setup, and Logic for the Orchestral stuff. Thanks again for this. Subbed!
Great video man! I’m currently running a base 2019 MacBook Pro and it’s ok but the fans kick in often and it gets really hot under like no load. M1 looks great and these rumours about an M2 air would be perfect for me!
I found your video only today and now I'm convinced this is a great solution for music production. Thank you for the information. I'm fully into the learning curve for composing music and trying to grasp everything needed to get going. I did a lot of research on the PC I would need and came to the conclusion that it is not an easy task to get a custom made PC if you do not build it yourself and know your way around the currently available components. And then I found a video about using the Mac Mini for this task. Since it is a lot of money to spend I started looking for videos about benchmarks for Audio PC's and Mac Mini in particular. I only found a few that were not that comprehensive as I would have liked them to be. So after about 3 weeks of reading about specs on PC's and Mac's I finally decided to buy the Mac Mini M2 with 16 Gb Ram and 512 Gb SSD. My first impressions with some of the songs I already made using Presonus Studio One 6 on a laptop was just perfect. Incredible stable and fluent performance without the machine breaking a sweat. The Apple engineers have really done a fine job with this little monster. I bought a 2 TB Western Digital Nvme SSD and a 40Gbit USB-C enclosure with it. That little disk cost me about 150 Euros and is almost as fast as the internal SSD. No need to pay the extra ridiculously priced 600 Euro for the 2TB internal drive. The machine flies and stays absolutely silent, wonderful.
Hey Matt! Thank you for this great and relevant video! I think the sessions you've demonstrated here were running on a sample rate of 44.1KHz. If you may share your experience with the performances when you run the same tests at 96KHz or 88.2KHz (for instance), it will be even better and more valuable for us to understand the real life capability of this new technology. Cheers!
Your Logic pun was the mainstage of your video :-) In all seriousness, well made video. I too moved from a gaming PC back to the Mac after M1 was released. Core Audio is a lifesaver.
AYYY a return pun! Core Audio is one of the best things about using macOS as a musician, but there are some very specific scenarios on Windows where I miss the way it handles audio drivers. Thanks for watching!
Honest, practical and very useful! I’m a Logic guy, but otherwise very similar. You instantly got my respect by NOT having an SM7B! Second; you’re absolutely right about track counts versus plugins. Track counts might mean nothing, if you have a lot of midi tracks. If you have the same virtual instrument on several tracks, Logic is supposed to optimize and only load the VST executables once… or so I’ve been told. Unfortunately, NI Komplete and many other 3rd party plugins are not so efficient. Despite recording and playing for 35 years, I only recently bought the NI Komplete 13 bundle, but have been using DeXEd, Spitfire, Ample, Korg and some other VSTs for many years. I’m curious what audio interface you use?
Excellent job the m1 knowledge was great but your playing hooked me finally some great feel, tone and groove in a style I don’t gravitate to, well done i subbed thanks
I think it’s pretty commonplace now not to have an actual amp when your setup is purely for recording. Many modern studios (and home studios) record the clean guitar track and use plugins to apply the effects. It allows for much greater flexibility when editing the sounds into the mix, so don’t feel guilty! Thanks for a helpful video
This is SO the video i need. Tend to be heavily into gabber music, Neurofunk DnB and other heavy composing/sounddesign stuff. I Also do like to Djent a little and record 8 strings and heavy bass and generally write heavy Metalcore stuff when i'm with my guitar friends. Nice to see you covering all platforms! cheers. Great vid. Love the Plintervals/Owane kind of song you did in the intro. keep it up!
Live is still using Rosetta emulation. Its not native ARM yet. Someday, when Ableton actually releases the native App. it WILL show a vast improvement. FWIW this is a still a good example of how a CPU intensive APP runs under Rosetta emulation.
Thank you so much Josh!! Big Blue World is up on my channel and should be on Spotify by mid-December. Currently working on several songs when I'm not working or making videos, and trying to get them out as quickly as I reasonably can.
Hi...First off, love your guitar playing, you sound great! You are absolutely correct, this kind of overview of the Mac Mini M1 performance in music production is sorely lacking. You really have provided valuable insight. I'm running Studio One on a 2012 Mac Mini. I upgraded to 16GB Ram, and a 512 GB SSD. I don't do more than 16-20 tracks, and minimal plug-ins. It works just fine! However, Apple has moved on from this hardware with software upgrades. I'm due. From your testing, probably 8GB would work fine for me, but my technical side says at least 16GB. I'll probably go for a M2 16GB 256GB with external Storage. We'll see. Anyway, thank you so much for this analysis, and make great music!
Thank you very much! I would definitely recommend 16GB of RAM. Regarding storage, in some testing that others have done, the actual speed of the SSD is also increased when upgrading from 256GB to even just 512GB. I would recommend considering that a bit further as well as the operating system may run more quickly. There are still some small issues that I experience with mine (mostly specific plugins), but it will be a very significant upgrade from your 2012 Mac Mini. I hope you enjoy it!
amen to you brother !! I Liked the video @ 01:30mins. I guess you are making the video that I have been postponing to make myself, for a handful of years.. Thank you for this.. I'll keep watching now.
Been waiting for a video like this. Good one. Would've liked to have seen Logic performance. I have the same mini BTO, and haven't managed to stress it out. Yet. For someone who isn't writing professional film scores or symphonies, the M1 is likely enough computer.
Yeah, I’ve had similar results in Logic Pro X on the M1 Pro surprisingly. When using a lot of 3rd party plugins (5-10 per track, a dozen tracks or so) the CPU gets stressed out. Still have to increase buffer size, processing threads and the likes. The 16GB of Ram on my machine doesn’t sweat too much though. Edit: Running Logic in Rosetta 2. Most of the 3rd party plug used aren’t M1 compatible.
Coming from a 8700k i7 to a M1 Pro: Project open a lot faster, i need to increase buffer size later and all summarized i can use more plugins one M1 before i need to freeze or render. And I use many VST instruments and FX per project. I have around 80-200 tracks per song
This is a great and helpful video!! With all the "fuss" about the new Mac Studio.. I've been contemplating getting one to replace my i7 "Mac" but wondered if I "needed" the Ultra or if the MAX was plenty for audio production. And I dug the performance clips.. but a "tele?" 😜 Subscribed!!
I think you did a very good job presenting a concise, factual, real-life condition based evaluation of the Apple M1 based computer for music applications. My experience with an Apple MacBook Air with a M1 processor, 16 GB of Ram and a 1 TB SSD is typical to yours when using Luna, Cubase or Logic.
Oh god, finally a useful video for music guys. I'm really thinking of getting one, I mostly do mixing and mastering, so a lot of audio files work and plugin, running high buffer size. But just heard of M1Pro, price is scaring me tbh, I hope this will not be over 1.6k€/$. My actual Mac Mini is starting to be a pain on some sessions. Is it still worth to get a classic M1 with 16Gb ram and 1To hard storage ? Price wise, it's in my budget.
I'm on the same boat, hoping I can wait it out until they release a mac mini with M1 and 32g ram. I'm guessing its gonna be more likely around $2k. Also annoyed and a little fearful about certain plugins not working and having to use rosetta with the M1 chips
Super agree with your intro right off the bat. It’s weird because I feel video production is barely less niche than music production but gets SO much more attention in testing and benchmarking lol.
I loved seeing you successfully use Ableton. I’m having major audio drop outs without any CPU overload. For me, the m1 pro MacBook is unusable with Ableton unfortunately. Can’t wait to see how they tackle it and will wait from the logic side of things.
Great video Loved your guitar instrumental! Great playing without overplaying! I’m getting a M1 MacBook so this let me know that what I’ll be using it for is more than enough
Plug-in Processing is definitely a drawback on the 8Gb but I believe the DAWs aren't optimised well. Logic Pro uses almost half the processing power compared to other DAWs I've used on ARM64. Hopefully with future DAW updates we will have better processing.
Subscribed just on the strength of that Kingdom Hearts inspired track. Damn too dope. I was thinking about an M1 upgrade but I usually do a lot of vocal tracks and effect to hide the bad singing - so I'm hoping my Waves & Izotope plugins (autotune anyone?) can avoid too much latency. I was originally in the market for an audio interface with USB C (maybe thunderbolt) and was considering one of the big dogs like Symphony Desktop or Apollo Twin X - but I'm thinking an M1 could allow me to not need to spend $1200 and up on an interface.
