Since cantai support for Mac Intel appears to be quite a ways off, if it ever arrives at all, and since my current laptop is Intel, I’m about to order a brand new MacBook Pro through Apple’s new Upgrade lease program. (Can’t afford to buy.) I’ve designed one that I think I’m happy with, but I worry if it’s enough to handle choral singing via cantai plus orchestra accompaniment via Note Performer, both at the same time.
It’s 10 core M5 with 48GB memory and 1TB storage. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that to adequately handle the type of load I’m talking about I would need 64GB memory, but I may be misremembering and I can’t find the post. And 64 is VERY expensive. I’d appreciate any feedback from anyone running cantai on a Mac with 48GB or thereabouts.
I have a M4 max with 48 GB of RAM and it’s clearly enough to cope with whatever I feed it with! It really does not compare to my old 2019 i9 macbook pro (32GB)
I have a M2Max Mac Studio with 32 GB RAM and it handles Cantai just fine. I only have the 512GB drive. I do keep all of my sound libraries except Cantai on an external SSD 512GB drive just to leave oodles of space for Cantai’s cache to run rampant…and it does periodically to around 15 GB. I even run Hauptwerk that requires 10GB of RAM and Cantai and Dorico and most any other apps I might want either continuously or intermittently but concurrently with Cantai with no problems.
I think the computer I am using at home is an M4 Max MacBook Pro with maximum RAM and memory. My recent 36 minute score for full orchestra and chorus takes forever to render. I’m not complaining. Cantai is amazing. But get the most power and RAM you can afford.
Cantai is just “slow” to render initially. V3.0.1 improved re-rendering speed after the initial rendering but the first time around takes a lot of time no matter how much computing power or memory you have. It is not yet using the GPU (at least on my Mac). So far, it seems to remember the language used as of the last update which is a big plus when reopening a project to continue working.
So, I wouldn’t go and buy new hardware believing that more RAM and a faster CPU will do much to improve the rendering time…at least in my humble opinion.
I’m wondering, always when I read this kind of posts, where this idea about huge amounts of RAM is coming from. What is really needed is GPU support, which was promised a long time ago.
Here are the official Cantai requirements:
macOS: Apple Silicon (M1 or later), macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Intel Macs are not supported.
Windows: Windows 10 (version 20H2 / October 2020 update) or later, x86-64 processor.
Windows on ARM (Snapdragon) is not supported.
RAM: 8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended for large scores.
Disk: ~4 GB available.
Internet: required for license validation, even when rendering locally.
I myself have 16 GB of RAM and that’s more than enough.
My research to find an M seriees laptop lead me to consider the max chip with no less than 64GB of memory in order to handle cantai and a full orchestral composition.
Cantai uses an average of 2 GB of memory on my M2Max Ma Studio. It does use several GB of disk space though. I would suggest investing in larger disk storage options with 32GB - 48 GB RAM being perfectly sufficient for most users.