yea, disappointed to hear they didnt announce the new M1X machines. the rumors were all over the internet that they were going to.
Decided to get a laptop and landed on the 13" air 8gb/256gb model. Managed to steer clear of all the upgrade options. Its a pretty solid laptop and macos has been a good experience. Got Studio One installed with current license and I could use my usb-c audio interface from Sound Devices. Only snag has been usb-c docking with my 24" 2k monitor. UI scaling isn´t great on macos 11 - atleast on my type of monitor.
wife and I finally ditched our 15 year old 1024 monitors for cheap LG 4k monitors. They look great mac an d win. VCV Rack looks really good at “retina” resolution.
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what monitors are you all liking/considering for your M1’s?
Initially i wanted to get an ultrawide, but after a talk with Steve, he hinted at 4K screens. Eventually I settled with an Asus 4K TUF VG289Q screen, very affordable, HDR.
This screen has more then enough screen estate, for the purposes that i need it for. Actually I’m glad i didn’t get the ultrawide.
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I’m a big fan of BenQ monitors. I currently have a two year old 32" 4K PD3200U. It slightly pre-dates HDR on monitors being widespread so doesn’t offer that but does have a 10-bit colour mode. It’s been a lifesaver over lockdown as it has an inbuilt KVM switch so I can swap between my home and work PCs with ease using the same peripherals. I have 2 monitors, the one on the right is a 27" 2K Dell l that I will probably replace at some point, but I don’t feel in a rush to do that. The only reason I’d have to change screens would be if I ‘need’ to use HDR, for instance, but I don’t. I have it on my TV for movies etc and I have no interest in playing around with video these days.
If anyone was wondering about the stand it’s a HUANUO Dual Monitor Stand I got off Amazon for about £40 and can handle up to two 35" monitors at 12 kg each. It’s wonderful how much extra desk space I get now and you can even swivel between portrait and landscape modes. Very nice. Unlike some stands though you don’t get much flexibility over height so as long as you can live with where they end up, which is fine for me, then they’re good value.
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I think everybody will recommend something else, because the right monitor heavily depends on what you are doing with your Mac or PC. I don’t need ultra-high refresh-rates or low-latency or 100% Adobe Colours, but I am watching movies, playing games and use it as a home-office-monitor for work. It is an ultrawide, the cheapest I could find (LC-M34-UWQHD-100-C-V2) and I am very happy with it. I have a 4K as a secondary display, which I rarely need, ultrawide is just perfect.
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thanks for the suggestion. im trying to stay under $300 since this will only be for the studio. im considering the LG 32QN600-B. looks solid for the price and has good reviews online. trying to stay under $1500 total and i still need to order a Keychron keyboard. unfortunately i’ve had laptops for the last decade so i dont have any spare monitors and will need to purchase one.
edit: after some more research i think i will be going with @Eurikon’s recommendation. there are many discussions online about monitors having issues with M1’s.
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My wife and and I have smaller LG monitors. She did have to call LG to make it refresh at 60hz. For some reason it really wanted to do 30 hz with a new MacBook via usb c. I forget what the solution was. Something non-obvious.
There are some additional display resolutions available if you hold option-key when selecting Scaled settings in monitor setup.
@dimdeep’ s Rack Hack…
What is this, I have looked all over in response to your comment and have not found anything. Is this a way to boost VCV performance on the M1 chip?
I ask because compared to my windows computers VCV performs dismally on my MacBook Pro M1, not sure if it’s because I’m doing something wrong.
He may have several, but the one I’m thinking of it the one that makes real time thread priority work on the Mac. It worked with my ancient “thread booster” plug-in, but was never implemented for Mac in VCV 1.x.
I’m trying to figure this out because this patch alone is running at 56% CPU according to the Mac activity monitor.
I changed the audio device to my macbook speakers, and it’s still hovering around 20%, is this normal?
I don’t know, but maybe it doesn’t matter? How does it work when it’s “doing something”?
Maybe I’m freaking out over nothing, I’m also not very experienced with VCV and so don’t know what is considered normal performance. On most patches my computer heats up enough to make me a little nervous lol, and vcv will occasionally either crash or to exit the program it I’ll have to force quit. Some modules put the cpu in overdrive, like Rackwindows Console, but not on my windows computer.
Others who use Mac will have more useful things to say. Laptops getting too hoot is a common complaint.
Does IAC “All Devices” include IAC itself? That would make midi clock go around in a loop (?)
Try changing that, and see if it has an effect on the CPU usage.
Edit: I’m not a mac user, but i have seen post about “feedback” loops on the IAC bus here and on other forums.
Yeah, not an issue. I have so far not had any problems to do with MIDI in VCV, and even when I delete the MIDI module entirely it doesn’t have an effect of the CPU usage
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I’ve seen it before - when you just have an audio module in the patch, un-connected, it uses a lot of CPU. It’s an artificial patch. Try and connect just an oscillator to the audio module and see if the CPU goes down.