Well, I bought one of the new Mac Studios, I got the one with the M1 Max 64GB, and I got it with the 1 TB SSD. So far, I am very pleased with it! It is quite a bit bigger than the Mini's I have seen in the past, but the big heat sink on the top does a very good job of keeping it cool, even when running RAM pretty full on a big sample set. Setup and Hauptwerk installation was pretty straight forward except I had trouble getting my Steinberg audio interface to work. It turns out I had to hold the power button on startup, and enable third party programs to make kernel extensions so the interface driver would work. Once I did that, everything worked perfectly!
The most taxing sample set I have run on it is the PAB Gravissimo Wet. With PAB version 3 wet, I am running it at 20 bit, with multiple attacks/multiple sample loops disabled to fit in the 64 GB. It should in theory be able to fit with 24 bit with only first attacks/loops, but for some reason when I do that, the audio driver still crashes even though I have 8.6GB of RAM free. Not sure why that is happening, it works fine at 20 bit, and other sample sets also work fine. I haven’t done a full stress test, but at 20 bit I did try practically every stop on the Great with every stop on the pedal, and even playing big block chords in quick succession the computer has no problem. I’ll have to keep working on getting the 24 bit sorted though - maybe decreasing the HW7 quality options? Loading my other big sample sets like Salisbury or Kampen happens in about 1/4 of the time as on my previous computer, and on significantly higher quality settings. (my previous computer was an i3 with 16GB of RAM). As expected, for these sample sets everything can be run maxed no problem.
So, overall I’m pretty pleased. It’s definitely a big upgrade over previous computers I have used for Hauptwerk! I have a feeling though, based on my experiences with the PAB, that to run a big multi channel set like Nancy, you’ll still probably need the 128GB M1 Ultra, and even for the PAB, you would need a computer like that to run everything maxed.
The most taxing sample set I have run on it is the PAB Gravissimo Wet. With PAB version 3 wet, I am running it at 20 bit, with multiple attacks/multiple sample loops disabled to fit in the 64 GB. It should in theory be able to fit with 24 bit with only first attacks/loops, but for some reason when I do that, the audio driver still crashes even though I have 8.6GB of RAM free. Not sure why that is happening, it works fine at 20 bit, and other sample sets also work fine. I haven’t done a full stress test, but at 20 bit I did try practically every stop on the Great with every stop on the pedal, and even playing big block chords in quick succession the computer has no problem. I’ll have to keep working on getting the 24 bit sorted though - maybe decreasing the HW7 quality options? Loading my other big sample sets like Salisbury or Kampen happens in about 1/4 of the time as on my previous computer, and on significantly higher quality settings. (my previous computer was an i3 with 16GB of RAM). As expected, for these sample sets everything can be run maxed no problem.
So, overall I’m pretty pleased. It’s definitely a big upgrade over previous computers I have used for Hauptwerk! I have a feeling though, based on my experiences with the PAB, that to run a big multi channel set like Nancy, you’ll still probably need the 128GB M1 Ultra, and even for the PAB, you would need a computer like that to run everything maxed.