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Harmonia is basically unison, multiplies the voices played and you can offset parameters between them. That was in the old one IIRC as well. It's basically stacking voices, so the whole voice is duplicated, and with it, CPU load as well.



That explains it.

Okay, just because I have no life I set up a sequence in Logic: eight instances of Omnisphere, loaded random patches, turned on Harmonia on one of the voices, added a Pro Reverb and a Spring Reverb to both A and B (in addition to what was already there). Then I drew in some MIDI notes and copied the track to each of the Omnispheres.

That's a ludicrous amount of Omnisphere for a human.

So why is my machine laughing at me?

More importantly, what do I need to buy so my machine will start messing up? Maybe an m.2 adapter so I can achieve more throughput and gain some benchmark shit?
 

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Okay, just because I have no life I set up a sequence in Logic: eight instances of Omnisphere, loaded random patches, turned on Harmonia on one of the voices, added a Pro Reverb and a Spring Reverb to both A and B (in addition to what was already there). Then I drew in some MIDI notes and copied the track to each of the Omnispheres.

That's a ludicrous amount of Omnisphere for a human.

So why is my machine laughing at me?

Should've loaded multis for starters (all from One Finger Wonders category, say), then turned on harmonia, FM, ringmod and WS on all the patches and all the layers, then add Innerspace everywhere :grin:


It might still not tip it over, but consider that there is a TON of things in Omnisphere (you can load up to 176 effects in there, IIRC), there's always potential to kill just about any machine.
 
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By the way, when I said I turned on Harmonia for one of the voices, I meant one of the layers.

Should've loaded multis for starters

As far as I can see there aren't any multis with the original Omnisphere. I didn't find One Finger Wonders.

In any case, I do believe you that you can break a 12-core 5,1 if you really try. I could also run out of memory if I loaded every mic position of every single Hollywood Strings articulation (in addition to everything else in my big template).

But to use the obligatory car analogy, if your car cruises at over 100 MPH fully loaded with five passengers and all their heavy luggage without breaking a sweat, and it can hit a top speed of 150 MPH - i.e. it has no problems performing much harder than you'll ever push it on actual roads - does it make sense to worry about the size of its engine compared to a new one?

Or something like that. :)

Some people like computer specs for their own sake, and I guess there's nothing wrong with that.

My point is that mortal musicians are unlikely to run out of computer resources on even a $1400 10-year-old machine (albeit one that's been upgraded with faster processors, more memory, and SSDs on a SATA 2 bus). And if they do, a cheap 10-year-old sample slave can handle the overflow.
 
Omnisphere is low on cpu :)
Try to run Kaleidoscope or B2 reverb at 4X oversampling in realtime at 64 buffer.
Or my favorite synth P900 with 8 voices and 8X oversampling. I cannot run one instance with 1024 buffer.
But i can run 200 ES2 instances :D
 
I bring my 2012 iMac i7 3.46ghz to its knees so much, I'm using Vienna Enseble Pro on anything that's even vaguely taxing. Poor thing has been begging to be put out to pasture for a while now, and now that the Mac Pro mystery has been revealed it may soon get its wish. (not with a $6k mac)

By the way, when I said I turned on Harmonia for one of the voices, I meant one of the layers.



As far as I can see there aren't any multis with the original Omnisphere. I didn't find One Finger Wonders.

In any case, I do believe you that you can break a 12-core 5,1 if you really try. I could also run out of memory if I loaded every mic position of every single Hollywood Strings articulation (in addition to everything else in my big template).

But to use the obligatory car analogy, if your car cruises at over 100 MPH fully loaded with five passengers and all their heavy luggage without breaking a sweat, and it can hit a top speed of 150 MPH - i.e. it has no problems performing much harder than you'll ever push it on actual roads - does it make sense to worry about the size of its engine compared to a new one?

Or something like that. :)

Some people like computer specs for their own sake, and I guess there's nothing wrong with that.

My point is that mortal musicians are unlikely to run out of computer resources on even a $1400 10-year-old machine (albeit one that's been upgraded with faster processors, more memory, and SSDs on a SATA 2 bus). And if they do, a cheap 10-year-old sample slave can handle the overflow.
 
I bring my 2012 iMac i7 3.46ghz to its knees so much, I'm using Vienna Enseble Pro on anything that's even vaguely taxing. Poor thing has been begging to be put out to pasture for a while now, and now that the Mac Pro mystery has been revealed it may soon get its wish. (not with a $6k mac)

Can you post a picture of a session that does that?

I’m quite serious when I say that I don’t even think about the computer - I just use it.
 
I don't think one can conclude that subsequent versions of the Mac Pro won't be ARM-based just because the upcoming one will run Intel. After all, the first cheese grater was a Motorola Power Mac G5. The second was an Intel Mac Pro.

Best,

Geoff
 
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My point is that mortal musicians are unlikely to run out of computer resources on even a $1400 10-year-old machine (albeit one that's been upgraded with faster processors, more memory, and SSDs on a SATA 2 bus). And if they do, a cheap 10-year-old sample slave can handle the overflow.

Yeah but if you want to work at low buffers it's a different story. Especially once you've got a bit of processing going on.
 
Sure! I'll dig some up. I think it's generally single core spikes that do it, from heavily scripted kontakt instruments, etc. Will put a few up here....

I would love to not think about my computer. I'm really tired of that...

Can you post a picture of a session that does that?

I’m quite serious when I say that I don’t even think about the computer - I just use it.
 
The more I read and think about it, the more get inclined to leave Apple behind me although I prefer Mac OS over windows. More then price and ridiculous upgrade costs (for memory and internal storage) this video gives me a lot of reasons to do it:

I clrearly remember Tim Cook mentioning many times, that environment was important to Apple. That is not believable at all with all the proof that Apple Genius bars lying to their customers about repair cost and at the same time deliberately shutting down third party repairs. While the new Mac Pro looks a lot more serviceable than the 2013 model, it's got the t2 chip! While that doesn't have to be that way, it might likely prevent all sort sind of replacements nad third party refer. If I would consider to dump as much cash for an underspecced Mac Pro, then this would surely only make sense for a long time investment and with the ability to replace nearly everything on this computer! And in case of mainboard malefunction in the future, I would also want to rely on a third party repair Center doing that for me vs. being faced with Apple telling me that I should rather buy the new 2024 Mac Pro Model, because fixing it would be several thousand bucks ...
 
Sure! I'll dig some up. I think it's generally single core spikes that do it, from heavily scripted kontakt instruments, etc. Will put a few up here....

I've also noticed that LPX has issues with dense midi through a channel. You won't necessarily see the CPU meters max out, but you'll get dropped events. Would a faster CPU help? Not sure since I don't have one to compare. Logic may have architectural issues in that area frankly.

The 5,1(with upgraded CPU) is still very much a very capable and relevant piece of hardware. Apple is trying to make it irrelevant by blocking it from running Catlina forward. Shame on them for such tactics.

But aside from that, its still to this day a very capable and relevant machine and really there are few situations where the mediocre single core performance would be an issue, perhaps never for many people. The exception would be for when you are using some particular Plugin or situation that does need stronger single core performance, in which case more modern offerings, including lowly Mac mini's have up to 2.5x the single core performance, which could be useful, especially when going for the lowest latency on cpu-hungry plugin chains. But with less cores, some of those lowly modern macs probably will would not keep up with the 5,1 in terms of high track counts, because of few cores.

I'm more annoyed that Apple is not continuing to support the 5,1 when its still a perfectly sufficient machine for an awful lot of people. If they want us to buy new hardware what they should be doing is coming out with something that is so outrageously good for a price we can't refuse that we all sell our 5,1's on Ebay for a bargain to people that could easily use it for another 10 years doing typical home desktop tasks; and run to the nearest Apple store to get that new thing. Failing that, they are now attempting to compel us to do so by dropping support of a completely adequate machine. They've been doing this kind of thing for decades so it shouldn't surprise me, but still it disgusts me.

Fortunately, there is a hackintosh community out there that has been figuring out for over a decade how to hack the kext's to get all kinds of hardware to work. I am fairly confident that 5,1 owners will be able to run Catalina and the next one after that too, and maybe more, for quite some time.. People will hack the kext's or the firmware or whatever it takes and get it done, because the hardware itself is still perfectly viable for years to come. I plan to keep using mine for a few more years, and unless Apple comes out with something that makes sense for me, I will probably build a hackintosh next time, but its too early to predict what Apple is going to do in 2-3 years.

The discussion about Xeon vs i9 is really more interesting in terms of what will Apple do next. The new MacPro uses the many-core Xeon's and I think for video work or perhaps scientific application where you need many threads crunching as much data as possible, yet not necessarily in realtime, it will be great. The discussion about whether stronger single core performance for audio production is still relevant. An i9 based solution for a new MacPro would have been better for audio production IMHO, because of the stronger single core performance, however I think Apple was able to go for the Xeon's as a way to have a 28core monster that would be useful for video houses and other situations where real time performance doesn't matter so much. So they based it on that, but truthfully, looking forward, I do not think that will be the best platform for audio production. Audio production needs strong real time performance, so a true improvement, and something that would be of interest to audio folks would be something based on i9 in my opinion, but I think that would have been too limiting for the markets that are going after, video, scientific, etc... We'll see new CPU's in the next few years and we'll see what Apple does...there are so many potential directions everything could go, but what I can say is that the new MacPro was not designed for optimal audio use, though some people would probably love it. But especially for the price... Its not what we need, in terms of a 5,1/6,1 replacement. We needed an i9 monster with PCI slots, storage bays and a $69 monitor stand.
 
They've been doing this kind of thing for decades so it shouldn't surprise me, but still it disgusts me.

Usually there's a hardware incompatibility when a machine won't run a new OS version, or for it not supporting all the new features (e.g. Handoff etc. due to the 5,1's Bluetooth chips).

The one that irritates me is that my iPhone 6 Plus won't run the next iOS version, but the 6S Plus will. There's nothing wrong with the phone - on the contrary, it's great - and I can't imagine the hardware has anything to do with it.
 
apparently they are hardware incompatibilities that a hacker is usually able to get around most of the time also. Apple chooses not too. It is a choice they make to not support the hardware. Using hardware incompatibility is a cheap excuse.
 
^ That assumes the beta compatibility list is the same as the release one will be.

I'm not going to put the next macOS on my 5,1 anyway, because it doesn't support 32-bit programs. Too expensive to update them all, and not worth it.

But with iPhones it's different, because most server-based apps (my bank, DirecTV, etc.) require constant updates to work, and they often break when you don't have the latest iOS. You can't just freeze the system, or create different startup partitions with older OS versions.
 
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