Cubase 11.0.10 on macOS Big Sur on Apple Silicon (M1) in Rosetta 2 mode. Feedback?

Some of you have already made the switch to the new Apple Silicon generation.

We are curious about your experience and feedback so far after the Cubase 11.0.10 update has been released?

Thanks,
Matthias

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Hi @Matthias_Quellmann.
I am on an M1 Mac mini. Running the latest Cubase everything and everything is running smoothly. I have not, personally, encountered any issues to this point.
Certainly looking forward to native support to take advantage, hopefully, of the integrated architecture of the silicon system.

Tom

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Works better on M1 than on Intel. Until now everything worked well

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how is the performance? Will we ever see a Cubase version perform nearly as good as Logic on the mac in terms of tracks and plugins, I wonder?

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I did not had any limitation for my needs on M1. Using a lot of plugins for MIDI and also effects. On my windows pc analog lab was so slow now I use 5-6 instances and flies.

Really looking forward to trying this on my M1 mini. Been hoping my demo didn’t run out before they got a working version out. Had great success with Logic, Bitwig, Studio One and Reaper on M1, so v excited.

Hi Matthias, firstly I want to say I am VERY impressed. The performance has been excellent, both in terms of CPU and graphics. Absolutely smooth as butter, significantly smoother than my Windows 10 build I just came over from.

So far, I have an issue regarding presets… I can’t seem to save any! I think I need to grant Cubase permissions to write to the audio folder but I think the application usually requests access to this folder when it needs it, and in this instance it hasn’t.

Ill pop more potential bugs in when I come across but so far so good, nothing show stopping… although I do use presets a lot in my workflow.

Edit, I just realised my FabFilter bundle also didn’t save the presets to this folder. I think perhaps developers are getting tripped up by the new security implementation in either m1 or Big Sur. Im just speculating of course.

Thanks,
Sean!

Would have to agree with it flying, many many instances of Omnisphere loaded from an external NVME thunderbolt 3 drive and absolutely no problems at all.

I too can confirm that 11.0.10 runs just fine on my M1 Macbook Pro spec’ed out. However, i do experience the occasional Beachball, sometimes for quite a long time. It happens very randomly, so that i can’t pinpoint it. When i’m in the middle of a heavy 150+ Tracks Session and add 3 Omnisphere instances at the same time it’s super snappy and other times if i open only one instance in a farily empty Session it takes 20 seconds, sometimes even a minute or so. RARELY freezes.

It seems like it has to do with the Rosetta translation.

All in all i wish the Asio Performance was a little better. I just upgraded from a 2017 Macbook Pro 4-Core 2,8Ghz with 16gb of ram and thought the M1 will absolutely Crush it, even through Rosetta. It barely beats my old mobile Setup. Would love Steinberg’s take on that. How can the overall “Rosetta” Performance be measured?

Studio One and Ableton give me at least 30% more Asio Headroom when opening the old Sessions on the M1 in Rosetta. Same Versions, same Plugin Versions, everything is the same.

One thing i can say though: C11 is GUI-Wise BY FAR the snappiest Version i have experienced in the last 5 Years on Mac, both on Intel and M1.

All i need now is quicker rendertimes, more processing power overall, better core-allocation i guess? Can you please comment on that Steinberg? Are there any Rosetta-specific Performance restrictions that don’t give me the actual power double the cores should give me? Obviously non-native Versions will run slower but by how much?

thank you

Since my initial comment, ive also experienced. a few beach balls here and there as well. Ive had one force quit and I also expect its to do with Rosetta emulation. In fairness it was a Brainworx plug in. Fab Filter and Steinberg plug ins appear to be loading practically instantly, so im not convinced its a host problem.

Just finished a full day of work. No crashes, but I did run into one problem…

I had to switch over to my Windows machine to export some stems, when I moved back to my Mac Mini it wouldn’t recognise the e-Licenser. I manager to get around it by running maintenance on the Win 10 machine, which didn’t initially work but after a reboot of the Mac it seemed to work, thankfully.

All in all happy so far but looking forward to a bit of polish in future updates. Speed wise, I am VERY impressed, but those Plugin Alliance plug ins do take their sweet time.

Fabfilter and Steinberg plug ins are like rockets.

Logged back on today after shutting down last night and its failing to recognise my e-Licenser again. Managed to get it working by removing and re-inserting.

Do you run cpu heavy plugins like soothe and gulfoss? How far can you push the machine? Not in audio track count but in plugin count particularly heavy ones?

I run 4-5 instances of analog lab, 5-6 sample tracks, SubLab, Groove agent with 8 outputs, some Kontakt tracks and a lot of effects like virtual mix rack of slates, reverbs, delay, compressors, bus compressors and effects on master and I don’t have any problem with it.

Thanks. That’s still not a very heavy project all things considered. But I’m sure it’s a strong machine nonetheless

It’s much stronger than my old Amd 8350 FX (8core) running at 4.2Ghz and also much stronger than. My MacBook Pro 2017 Intel I5 3.2ghz 2 core

Its not an absolute power house in Rosetta mode, you can feel it wanting to go faster but its held back translating. If it was all ARM it would smoke pretty much anything i5/i7 IMO. Currently it feels about 10-15% faster than my i5 8400 in terms of sheer processing under translation. What I do notice is that write and seek times are crazy fast, I don’t know the technicalities but it feels like the latency from SSD/RAM/CPU is really really low. If I have a light session which has no Brainworkx plug ins (can take up to 20 seconds to load) its VERY VERY quick to load.

I make a lot of beats for artists and when I mix I tend to mix quite light so I can’t comment how it performs under extreme stress, but I personally know under 2048 buffer size I will struggle to max it out, but I do mix quite light.

I have had about 8 instances of Soothe2 and Pro-L2 on 16x on my master on 256 buffer size and its been fine.

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Cubase seems to run but I haven’t installed the extras yet.

Also, my audio interfaces aren’t yet supported so I didn’t go far in trying Cubase 11 on OS 11.

Do the Steinberg interfaces have drivers compiled for M1? I’d be interested in trying it.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Are you using any big libraries on the Mac M1?