Pro Tools Tested On MacBook Pro M1 Max With Staggering Results
We are working as fast as we can to address your questions about the new Apple MacBook Pro powered by M1 Pro and M1 Max SoC.
We can’t currently run the standard power test we normally use as some of the Avid plugins used in our standard Power Test are currently incompatible with macOS 12 Monterey. Because the new Apple MacBook Pro ships with Monterey pre-installed, and cannot be rolled back, in the meantime we are responding to the questions we can answer. following on from our article MacBook Pro 2021 With M1 Max - Experts Give Their First Impressions, in the comments community member Ru Cook asked us;
“Can you please test multitrack (16 channels+ ideally) tracking at low buffer settings with typical plugins please?”
The Test
Instead of just recording 16 tracks at a low buffer setting we decided to really tax the new MacBook Pro with a large session to see what would happen. The session has over 700 tracks, with instances of the Xpand virtual instrument. The session also uses numerous instances of Avid stock plugins including 14 instances of EQIII, 117 instances of Dyn 3, 1113 instances of Channel Strip, 1 instance of Dverb and 1 instance of Dither.
Note, this is another unscientific test with a number of things we need to declare...
Pro Tools isn’t yet supported to run natively on the new Apple Silicon SoC chips, which means this test has been undertaken with Pro Tools and all the plugins running Rosetta 2.
Pro Tools also isn’t yet supported in macOS 12 Monterey, on either Intel or Apple Silicon powered Macs.
We are recording and playing back the internal sound card and using Quicktime to capture the screen, which is why there is no audio on the video.
To record 16 new tracks we routed an existing track via an internal bus to capture the sound.
We recorded to the internal drive, which is not recommended by Avid. Instead, Avid recommends professionals record to an external high-performance drive.
MacBook Pro Specifications
The specification of the MacBook Pro is as follows;
Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
64GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
Pro Tools Session Settings
H/W Buffer size: 32 samples
Video engine: Disabled
Ignore errors during playback/record: Disabled, we wanted to see Pro Tools stop working if it encounters any errors.
Dynamic plugin processing: Off
Optimise Performance at Low Buffer Settings: Enabled.
Cache size: 2GB
Total Audio Tracks: 568
Total tracks including busses and VIs: Over 700
The Results
Please watch the video to see what happened…
Observations
We saw the following…
Despite this being a very large session running on an unsupported OS and chip, it was rock solid even at the lowest buffer setting.
There were no audio dropouts, crackles, or pops.
One of the indications that Pro Tools is struggling is that things like the counter, metering and timeline cursors start to stutter. We observed none of these usual indications. This may be down to the new GPU power and memory sharing on the SoC using unified memory.
Summary
We think even the most hardened Apple hater would be impressed by the performance shown in this, admittedly unscientific, power test. We shared the video with some trusted professionals before publishing and they were all as shocked by the results as we are.
There are many more tests to come, including as mentioned, our reference Power Test, which we would conduct to benchmark these machines with other computers.
What test would you like us to do next? Please leave suggestions in the comments. We can’t promise to do every one of them as we are currently restricted by plugin and hardware compatibility issues, but we will do our best.
If you are expecting delivery or are planning to order a new Mac, which is powered with an Apple Silicon processor or that uses macOS 12 Monterey then make sure you check out our compatibility guides before making them the centre of your studio setup.
You can read about our first impressions of the new Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max here