In this week’s podcast, Mike is joined by Guillaume Jeulin and Matt Hill to explore the challenges are developing audio software for the Apple Silicon platform as well as what the audio software and pro audio industries might look like a couple of years once ARM-based computers have matured.

The Guests

Matt Hill

LiquidSonics founder Matt Hill’s interest in music production technology started during his time at university in the early 2000s and lacking a good reverb for his own productions Matt chose to produce a low latency convolution reverb for his final year dissertation. Matt graduated and went on to put his coding skills to work in the aerospace industry whilst at the same continuing to develop plugins. Over time the demand for LiquidSonics reverbs grew, and Matt left his aerospace job to make plugins full time. Now LiquidSonics is one of the most respected names in reverb, his products are used by many top names in music and post.

Guillaume Jeulin

Guillaume Jeulin is a musician, software engineer and audio fanatic based in Paris (France). He founded Blue Cat Audio in 2003 as a way to combine his love of music and computers

Talking Point

In this week’s podcast, we explore the challenges of developing software for Apple Silicon computers and we couldn’t think of two people more qualified to discuss this topic than Matt and Guillaume.

• Let’s roll back a while, when did you become aware that Apple might move away from Intel and make their own processors?

• I recall that both of you signed up for the Developer kit that came as a specially modified Mac Mini with an iPad chip in it, after the WWDC in June 2020. How useful was that for you?

• How did you find Rosetta 2? How quickly were you able to get something working?

• Once the first M1 production models came out, were there any major differences, or have the developer kit set you up pretty well?

• What Is Rosetta 2?

• Going back in time, were either of you in the game when Apple went from PowerPC to Intel with Rosetta 1

• Were there any challenges with the Apple Silicon architecture that you are able to talk about?

• How have you got on with running your software natively on Apple Silicon, rather than via Rosetta 2?

• How difficult has it been when most of the DAWs don’t seem to be ready?

• There has been a lot of concern that 16GB of RAM in the M1 computers isn’t enough for what we need in pro-audio. What is your view?

• How do you see the future of pro audio with Apple Silicon? Will it make a significant difference to the end-users, in terms of speed and performance and cost?

• Matt, you shared something online about running Windows under emulation on an M1 Mac, can you expand on that and share what you found?

Find Of The Week

• Matt - Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++: For AAX, AU, and VST3 with DSP Theory. It may seem like an odd choice but how many times have you read a cookbook, not to cook the recipe, but just to understand how they did it. As users, you might like to read this book to gain a better understanding of developing the software tools that we all use.

• Mike - CNC machines to cut word to size including a cut out for a speaker. As many listeners know I am installing a Dolby Atmos rig in my studio here and one of the challenges was how to mount the ceiling speakers. As part of the acoustic treatment, I have a suspended ceiling with 150mm of Rockwool sat on top. The plan I came up with was to cut a speaker sized whole in four of the acoustic tiles, but I was concerned that the tile would not be strong enough. So I decided to replace the til with 12mm plywood. Then I looked at getting it cut to size and came across companies with CNC machines and so I was not only able to get them cut to size but also get cutouts in each one to take a PMC DB1 speaker.

• Guillaume - As a guitarist I have been looking at ways of being able to select different pickups and came across the Freeway Switch, to get more pickup combinations on a guitar