The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by Daho0n on Friday December 25, 2020 @04:10AM (#25535296)

As a former sound engineer I can state for a fact that this is not true. We stopped using Macs while I was still doing it and it was back in like ~98 when we moved for real to digital studios. Depending on what we were doing the only thing the Macs gave us were bigger purchase and support bills. What Apple had going for them was history so people didn't know as much about how to support the setup if it wasn't Macs. The non-Apple software was just fine and the hardware, at the same price point, way better.

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Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by cehrlich on Friday December 25, 2020 @04:31AM (#25535375)

I remember working with some Windows 7 setups and having to deal with stuff like WASAPI Drivers and ASIO4All, having to daisy chain MIDI through the out on synths (which introduced jitter) because there is only one system MIDI in and out, etc. Perhaps there was a way to get these things working smoothly, but on the Mac all this stuff just worked out of the box. My situations were probably edge cases in terms of how much gear was connected to a single computer, but still.

I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare.

A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".

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Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by ratww on Friday December 25, 2020 @08:51AM (#25536457)

1998 was before OS X was released and before Apple purchased Logic. This is when things changed for the better, while in Windows things kind of remained the same audio-wise.

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Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by Reason077 on Friday December 25, 2020 @04:25AM (#25535347)

This era was kind of a low point for the Mac. The dying days of both PowerPC and MacOS 9, overpriced underperforming hardware, and the slow painful transition to OS X. Things started to improve after 2006 when Apple switched to Intel.

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Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by graeme on Friday December 25, 2020 @06:15AM (#25535808)

That’s 22 years ago. Whole other era. Steve Jobs had just returned, so macs weren’t yet intel and they weren’t running OS X yet, using the NEXT architecture.

In other words, you and OP may both be right. Three absolutely massive transitions at apple between your era and theirs: hardware, software and management quality.

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Re:The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway by Applejinx on Friday December 25, 2020 @01:09PM (#25537995)

If you stopped using Macs before CoreAudio was invented, I don't really even know what to say, other than I'd have run away from running digital audio on an Apple II, too :)

Your bad luck was that you bailed out of the MacOS audio subsystems just when they started to get good.

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