I’ve recently moved from a mac pro trashcan to a mac studio (m4 max, 64gb). I’ve done a clean install; everything is much faster in large scores. In the old mac, a barline change (e.g single to double) needed 5-6 seconds, now it takes 1-2 seconds. Also moving items on Engrave mode is much faster, dynamics, texts etc.
Also bought a UA Volt 1 interface, quite basic, no drives and haven’t installed any of the software which comes with it (plugs in etc). All smooth so far.
Also to mention that I firstly installed the ol’ Finale which runs fine, hope it keeps the same with future versions of OS (now in 15.4.1). I kept Finale in the old mac which is stuck on Monterey.
It seems a new computer is needed for running Dorico without being sluggish for large scores, I guess a mac mini should be sufficient too. Hope the Dorico 6 will bring nice things.
I hope I will be able to do just like you! Are you using orchestral libraries? I was wondering whether 64GB were enough, I couldn’t find the information over the net…
A 12-core 2013 Mac Pro score 677 / 4899 on Geekbench.
A 14-core M4 Max scores 3874 / 22364.
Unsurprisingly, 12 years of progress mean that everything is going to be multiple times faster.
But what size is the score for these slow barline changes? For me, they are more or less instant on most scores.
The OS is on a separate, secure, read-only volume, so you never need to erase the entire disk and reinstall the OS. The benefits of ‘starting over’ in your user account are largely overrated, except as a means of pinpointing a problem.
Wow… I didn’t know that. A separate read-only volume to the standard SSD?
With my 2017 iMacPro now wheezing its way through the last set of OS updates, I’m going for the M3 Ultra in the next couple of months. I’ve got a few Dorico files that take a while to load - it’ll be interesting to se how much faster they will be with a new setup.
Not a separate device; but a “volume” (i.e. a partition) on the internal storage. It’s read-only, and “cryptographically sealed”, so that any alterations will prevent it from booting. Everything else (temp files, apps, preferences, user space) is on a different volume, making it easier to wipe, but leave the OS intact.
The studio m4 max jumps from 64gb to 128gb, nothing in between only a $800 difference! so I choose the 64gb. I use Noteperfomer with the basic sounds, I have also the cinematic strings with nppe when i like to listen to better sounds. In Logic Pro I work and bounce every channel to audio separately , so the ram usage is pretty small. If you can afford I’d say go with 128gb it sounds impressive nevertheless! A few years ago I’ve had a laptop with 4gb : )
Hi Marc, I decided to go for 128GB for future proofing.
Using NP with BBCSO core for strings, Spitfire solo strings and EW for choir takes about 35GB, with another 5GB or so for other playjng techniques directly in Dorico.
I think a full orchestra would take >60GB based on this.
I bought mine about a month ago as soon as they came out. M4 Max, 128 GB, 2TB. I have an additional 14TB in NVMe drives in an OWC Express 4M2. (I already had all those drives in my previous PC.) It’s amazing how quiet it is compared to my previous PC build! On the 1000 bar, Modern Orchestra, Silence template condensing benchmark test I got:
It took me 10 years to buy a new computer and the last one (mac pro 2013) belonged to a friend of mine who sold it to me in a very low price! I’ve done my doctorate, a 500-page portfolio of compositions, in a laptop with 4gb ram, these were the days
Once the M4 MacBooks were announced, I purchased an M3 MacBook Pro on sale. That was my first Mac purchase for myself since the 90s. (The rest of my family is on Macs.) I’ve always enjoyed building my own PC desktops, but the M3 MacBook was so much faster than my 5950x build, that I ended up docking it, even though it was only supposed to be my school / travel laptop. I knew the M4 Studios would eventually be coming out so I just budgeted and prepared my wife for the purchase, LOL!
I have an M1 Pro MBP and M2 Pro Mini, both with 32Gb of RAM, and I can see absolutely no need to upgrade for quite some time! The RAM is sufficient for using BBCSO, and I usually have a large range of apps open, e.g. Dorico, Affinity Suite, FontLab, etc.
@benwiggy This sounds very comforting to me. I am waiting for the next generation of Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio and I hope that they will offer a configuration without a dGPU but with 32GB of RAM this time. Intel is a few years behind these days, but the Arrow Lake CPUs that I am expecting the device to be built upon should be on par with an M1 oder M2 generation laptop chip.
64GB would be better of course, but I suppose that would require me to get a configuration with a dedicated Nvidia GPU, which I neither need nor want. Reading that 32GB seem to be sufficient for orchestral libraries restores some hope and has my wallet tremble in fear of the end of this year a little less.
(P.S. For anyone else reading this: I do know that Macs are generally better for music purposes, but there a several reasons why I would like to remain on Windows.)
Isn’t the new architecture of modern macOS and the Apple M chips built to share memory between the disk and the memory chip? That is why one would not need these high numbers of GB RAM nowadays anymore. I am just speculating of what I remember having read somewhere.
I have only read about the unified RAM between GPU and CPU operations. Where on a PC with a dedicated GPU that memory is separated (while it can be shared with some recent workarounds, as far as I know), on the Apple Silicon Macs it is unified in the first place and can be freely distributed to CPU or GPU operations - one has to keep in mind that Apple prefers to build powerful GPUs right into the SoC nowadays though, dGPUs aren’t supported by Apple Silicon Macs anymore.
Distributing working memory usage onto the RAM and the disk isn’t something new, this has been around for decades and is known as virtual RAM. What has changed in the meantime is primarily the speed and responsiveness of the non-volatile storage, having shifted first to SSDs and then to addressing them via PCIe. Nevertheless, non-volatile memory can only so far act as working memory, while volatile RAM will always be faster by magnitudes.
What I can imagine is that Apple generally has found very efficient ways to make use of the RAM that is there, I just remember iPads and iPhones sticking to comparably small RAM configurations for a rather long time without that many complaints from the user base - apart from those that do study spec sheets. But if a certain amount of sufficiently responsive RAM is required for a certain task or application, there is usually no way around it.
I’m working with a 2019 intel macbookpro (16 inches, 32GB Ram), I’ve been able to work with quite demanding libraries but always fearing sound glitches, waiting for some operations… I’ve been waiting some years to change, and I think now is the time to change. I am willing to future proof so I might invest in some extra RAM, certainly not internal storage (that’s what thunderbolt 5 is there for, and it’s really impressive). I will let you know once I have the money…
