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steve_rolfeca

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  1. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    I appreciate and share everyone's frustration with the slow pace of development at Line 6, as well as other vendors like Focusrite, etc. However, we all seem to forget that Mac market penetration is still vanishingly small. Apple might be the richest company in the world, but the last time I checked, HP, Lenovo and Dell still controlled 65% of PC sales. Apple's share at the time was still well under 8%. As I mentioned in my previous post, the veterinary software I'm involved with, is still only compatible under Rosetta. Our database is programmed in 4D, and God only knows when 4D will offer us an ARM-compatible version. I don't expect 4D to commit big $$$ to the development process until Windows on ARM is a stable, mass-market product. This isn't just about whether Macs are viable from a performance perspective. If you expand your thinking to include business environments, there are other factors to consider. For example, competent Windows IT technicians are everywhere. High-quality Mac IT support is much harder to find, especially if you're outside of a major metropolitan area. I understand 4D's position in this. And Line 6's as well: Big Sur and M1 Mac users represent a tiny fraction of personal computer owners: Out of that fraction, only a few are heavily in niche computer applications like Veterinary medicine or digital guitar modelling. Of those few, how many would commit to a Mac-only environment if their business or their family income depended on it, especially given how accessible and affordable Windows PC's are?
  2. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    This is big news. I'm sure you lose some track count under Rosetta, but really, how many of us run enough simultaneous tracks and plugins to seriously stress Logic Pro on an M1 Mac anyway? My day job is tech support for one of the few remaining software companies that still provide a Mac option for Veterinary practice management. We are part-way through our final beta testing on M1, and it's going well. Even under Rosetta, the base model M1 MacBook Air is blindingly fast when it comes to processing medical records- faster than anything else I've ever seen, price no object. Compared to our past struggles after the release of Sierra, Mojave and Catalina, it's been very satisfying to reach compatibility with both a new OS and a completely new hardware platform only 6 months after the M1 release.
  3. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    These are the challenges that every level of a corporation faces, when the underlying business model is built around planned obsolescence. Instead of your smartphone getting cheaper and more reliable with each generation, prices on so-called flagship phones have been inching up for years, yet a new phone is somehow always easier to get and more attractively priced than a repair. They've been pulling the same nonsense with MacBooks. Just to pick one example, every new generation gets an improved keyboard that supposedly fixes the atrocious reliability problems, except that a year or two later we're seeing disturbing reports about the improved models, lawsuits over equally bad keyboards, ribbon cables that were arbitrarily shut out of replacement warranty programs, etc. Sucking us into this nonsense takes some world-class sleight of hand. One of the ways they funnel us into their trap, is with annual OS updates and ever-increasing backwards incompatibility. The programmers at Apple are evidently struggling just as much as we are to keep up. If you can't come up with a revolutionary new user interface in time for the fall release, and management won't let you do something obvious like incorporate a touchscreen into a laptop (something that's a routine feature on Chromebooks!), at least you can screw around with the way it looks, and move a bunch of icons around to confuse people when they open the System Preferences... I make about a third of my annual income off supporting Apple products, and I still love a lot of their stuff. That doesn't change the fact that it's getting harder to stomach being complicit in what they're doing with every passing year...
  4. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    Did another audit of the M1 and Big Sur situation this week, using the Sweetwater compatibiity list as a starting point. There's been some progress since the beginning of the year- there are now a number of audio vendors that are not only boasting hardware/firmware compatibility with Big Sur, but also have their control software up and working now, either with Big Sur on Intel, or in some cases, either natively or under Rosetta on M1. The pace has picked up since the end of March, and there are now at least a dozen vendors that have full or close to full compatibility with M1. The situation with plugins has also improved. However, there are still over 150 popular audio companies that are not compatible. Many of them haven't posted a meaningful update to their websites since the original "don't update yet" messages they posted in November or December of 2020. I wish the situation was better, and I wish that Line 6 was ahead of the overall trend instead of mid-pack, but there it is. I've been watching audio vendors struggle to keep up with OS changes (especially since Apple went to annual updates) for over 20 years, and the last couple of years (Catalina and Big Sur plus M1) have been the toughest transitions that I can remember. I can only hope that M1 will turn out to be stable once everybody makes it over to native code without Rosetta.
  5. The Alto TS2 series had smaller power amps and different drivers. 1100W peak, 550W rms. At the time they were released, the Headrush FRFR-108 and 112 were the new, improved version. Thus the original claims of improved performance. Roughly double the available power, although I imagine that the DSP caps that to suit the drivers in each model. For instance, I highly doubt that the 8" woofer in the FRFR-108 is capable of handling 1000W, peak OR rms. My understanding is that if you want a direct, apples-to-apples comparison, you need to compare the 12" Headrush with the later Alto TS312. Here in Canada, there is a small but proportionate increase in the MSRP of the TS312 relative to the Headrush, presumably because of the addition of the mic pre. Also, a PA dealer up here posted a YouTube comparison between the Headrush 112 and Alto 312, using a guitarist and bassist as test dummies. The Headrush was definitely hotter initially, but that could just be a different calibration on the sweep of the pot.
  6. I ran the original, first-gen L1 for years. Had to use a more efficient sub with it in order to accommodate my 5-string basses, but it was a terrific experience. It seemed almost room-independent. So much clarity, and near 180-degree dispersion. No complaints from people in the centre front row about getting a haircut from the treble, no-one talking about mushy sound off to the sides. Plus, for monitoring purposes, it was like wearing a giant pair of studio headphones.
  7. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    I agree wholeheartedly that Line 6 could reduce everyone's stress level by regularly updating the compatibility posts that are anchored at the top of the forum. Even a brief update like "still working on it, 26Jan21" would reassure people that they haven't forgotten us. That said, a lot of comments are made on these threads that demonstrate an ignorance of the difference between software development in the general business market, and in pro audio. The first and most important thing to understand, is that as musicians, we are in a unique situation: 1. Click-free multi-channel audio doesn't require nearly as much bandwidth or speed as more demanding tasks, like video rendering. But, and it's a BIG but, we have very special requirements in terms of timing and synchronization: Windows or Mac, getting a good DAW setup stable generally takes some tweaking and some hard-earned computer savvy. Even when you get it running reliably, simple things like minor OS upgrades can take you down for days. That's why studio owners often run their audio computers on a separate, isolated network, and only update when they absolutely have to in order to obtain a new feature. That's also why studio owners are extremely conservative about new tech and new code. A lot of my friends are 2 or 3 versions behind the latest release on their primary DAW software. Allow me to repeat that last point: In the residential computer market, and amongst amateur musicians, there's a general sense that newer is better. Their computers are also used for everything from audio creation to personal correspondence to consuming pornography, so there's a pressing need to keep up with the latest toys and the latest security patches. That makes no f#$%#@ sense in a pro audio environment. If I've finally tweaked a 32-channel 192K computer audio installation to the point that it's stable and giving me glitch-free recording and playback with tons of plugins active; if I'm invulnerable to malware because my audio computers aren't connected to the internet; if I'm making great recordings and my clients are happy; why on earth would risk rocking the boat? Why would I even need a new operating system? 2. This is something of a "cottage industry". Some of the heaviest hitters in pro audio are tiny compared to even mass market hardware and software businesses. They don't have thousands of employees, and many of the ones they have are often elbow deep in development and prototyping. As such, they don't have a ton of pull with Apple, which is a notoriously difficult company to work with. 3. Another thing worth considering, is that contrary to popular belief, Line 6 is not an outlier in the music industry, in terms of not having full Big Sur and Apple M1 compatibility worked out yet. Go to Sweetwater, and look for yourself: https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/macos-11-big-sur-compatibility-guide/#macOS-11-Big-Sur-Compatibility-List I've been checking that list regularly since late November, and there's still over one-hundred and eighty vendors with their status marked as "Wait to update: Check back later." Pretty much everyone who is anyone, is on that list. It's also worth noting that so far in the month of January, less than a dozen companies have reported any meaningful progress. Even the ones that claim to have "Limited Compatibility, read more", are mostly only reporting partial functionality. Big Sur is a bit of a beast at the moment, which is not unusual for the annual Apple OS upgrade cycle. Everybody loves to hate the latest version of MacOS until about mid-year, which is typically when things finally start to stabilize. More importantly, Big Sur is a major milestone for Apple, bigger than the previous move from Motorola to Intel processors. It incorporates massive changes to the core Mac OS functionality, which had to be made in order to use new M1 silicon. M1 Macs have a revolutionary, simplified architecture that offers tremendous efficiency in terms of RAM utilization and power consumption: suddenly 8GB is the new 32GB, and 15 Watts is the new 165W. That is literally a game-changer for the entire PC industry. You simply don't get that kind of disruptive innovation in the computer and software industry without some headaches....
  8. I currently make about 30% of my income from Macs. 10 years ago, it was about 60%. Our Mac users used to love the reliability of their older Macs, but OS update issues, declining reliability and planned obsolesence have driven most of them over to Windows. Don't even get me started on butterfly keyboards... Like you, I used to like to keep my old Macs around as backups. In recent years, that hasn't been working so well for me: After replacing my 2009 MacBook Black with a 2011 15" MacBook Pro, I kept the old laptop up to date as a backup. My wife's 2010 iMac received one free repair under a factory recall, and then had to be replaced when a second failure was deemed unrepairable. I had to replace the 2011 MacBook Pro in 2018, because of discontinued parts. I replaced it with a 2017 iMac, which barely out-performed the old laptop. I would like to update it, but removing the glued-in display is not a task for the faint of heart. Meanwhile, that old Intel MacBook Black? It still fires up first try, every time I check in on it. Of course, it''s functionally useless because of incompatibility with current software...
  9. I just re-checked the Big Sur and M1 compatibility chart on Sweetwater. No further updates that I could see from Focusrite and the handfull of other vendors that were reporting partial compatibility on their class-compliant USB interfaces 10 days ago. However, there is one significant update out of the nearly 190 vendors that Sweetwater is tracking: RME now reports compatibility with M1 as well as big Sur on a number of their interfaces, including the Babyface Pro. No caveats like all the other manufacturers- they just indicate that everything works, period. Unless there are some gotchas in turns of things like sampling rate restrictions, this is the first music vendor to report full compatibility. This suggests to me that the timing issues with the M1 hardware may not be as difficult as it initially appeared. Hopefully, it also means that other manufacturers will soon follow RME's lead. Personally, I would still want to haunt the forums for a while to see if there are any issues before purchasing a nice shiny new RME interacing to use with an M1 Mac. RME is a terrific vendor, and their driver support has always been stellar. Still, I wouldn't want to buy a pricey new interface, and then discover that there were unreported glitches in audio applications...
  10. Sweetwater's Mac compatibility matrix lists 189 vendors that sell music-related hardware or software, and are not fully Big Sur/Apple Silicon compatible. Out of that list, only 11 vendors were claiming Limited Compatibility status as of a couple of weeks ago: 1. Apogee 2. Applied Acoustics System 3. Best Service 4. Blue Cat Audio 5. Focusrite 6. G-Force 7. Motu 8. Native Instruments 9. Presonus 10. Reason 11. Spectrasonics All the other vendor listings simply said "Wait to upgrade, check back later." Amongst those with limited compatibility, the typical situation is that some audio interfaces and a few simple USB devices like podcast microphones may work with Big Sur in USB class-compliant mode, but control apps and/or enhanced drivers aren't ready yet. In the cases where individual products are compatible with Big Sur on Intel CPU's, many of them still aren't compatible (or have yet to be tested) with M1 silicon. Even more interesting to me, is that there are lots of M1-specific caveats related to timing-related features. In some cases, higher sample rates over 96K are glitchy or unavailable, and support for Firewire audio interfaces seems to be thin on the ground. This is reminiscent of the current situation with AMD Ryzen processors- while they post excellent, Intel-shaming performance scores on demanding multi-core tasks like video rendering, users are reporting problems with timing-dependent processes. It appears that something about the overall design causes higher end-to-end latency, along with other problems that affect plugin and DAW performance. I'm curious to see whether these issues are going to respond to further development, or if they will simply turn out to be baked-in hardware limitations in the early versions of AMD and Apple's new-breed architectures.
  11. steve_rolfeca

    Big Sur

    I noticed that as well. However, I'm seeing posts all over the place about continuing issues with various plugins, audio drivers etc., on M1 Macs, involving a broad range of vendors. It seems that while Big Sur/M1 is pretty terrific for video editing and coding, it's still causing problems with pro audio creation, and there seems to be a suggestion in those threads that when it comes to audio, the M1 hardware is a bigger problem than Big Sur as an operating system in isolation.
  12. I'm primarily a bassist. The Stomp does everything I need and more for bass. I use it live in all sorts of venues, and I have patches for each of my gigs with variations to suit both my electric and acoustic basses. I also use it for personal practice and for recording. I do add a few external pedals to my Stomp for electric guitar, but as KozMcCharlie mentioned, there's already a lot of great bass tones in the box. If you want the Darkglass sound, the Obsidian OD model is the Helix equivalent, and it's in the HX Stomp. The Obsidian can get you very close to a B7K with a bit of tweaking. You can also adapt other Helix OD's to bass, by mixing in some direct signal. That's a big part of Darkglass' recipe for high-gain tones with plenty of note definition. If you're experienced enough to know exactly what you want, it's all pretty easy to dial in via HX Edit. Once you've nailed your patches and saved them them, you don't have to go back to HX Edit very often. Where a physical Darkglass pedal would come in handy, is if you're just starting out and don't know how to dial in a good distorted bass tone. In that situation, the B7K, Ultra, etc., will give you quick, easy access to popular Metal bass tones. If you're unsure on how to tweak the settings, help for Darkglass stuff is all over the internet, and you can dial up your tones without having to go menu-diving. Still, Darkglass gear is pretty expensive. If you've got the time get to know the Stomp a little better, I would wait until you've maxed it out before deciding whether or not you blow the big buck$ on more pedals.
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