I have an Arm macbook (thanks to advice from this group 
), and I have some questions about arm that I hope some more technical people in this group can answer for me.
In short, will using arm versions of Rack only be interesting if all (or most) plugins are built for arm, or will it be possible to use a mix?
In short, yes, no.
Thank you. Just as I suspected, and another bridge we can only cross by leaving behind half the collection.
Ah, too bad.
Give it a bit of time. Devs are verifying (and possibly fixing) their plugins for ARM and I’d be surprised if it’s more than a year away for an official Rack release for ARM+macOS with a full or nearly full library available. The last stragglers will be the commercial plugins I’m sure.
Really? Commercial plugins are usually some of the first to get sorted no?
There are a few developers who seem to have lost interest in Rack, and whose products I would miss a lot. Some of those I can only use because a friend made builds for me. But that’s not always possible, either.
So I’m a bit less optimistic.
But we’ll see
Could be that you’re right, and I’m mostly remembering some special cases.
Yeah, that seems to happen on every new major Rack version, and might happen with ARM as well. However, my impression is that for ARM plugins mostly don’t need any changes at all but simply an additional build for ARM, so I’m pretty optimistic. It might very well be that the new ARM release will be close to a non-event, except for some people on ARM whose life will get easier and perhaps with a percievable performance boost.
We already know that well over a thousand modules work fine on ARM (a certain Rack derivative has cross-platform ARM builds for over a year now).
The main issue is the logistics of having everything automatically build for the store.
Toolchain seems ready. I have used it, and haven’t had any complaints about ARM builds not working.
Downside is this is still only for Apple ARM and not all ARM systems 
Using ARM versions of Rack depends on plugins; mixing ARM and non-ARM versions might work.
Yes, yes, no. But you can install both versions at once, I think.
I’m pretty sure not. Not mixing ARM/non-ARM plugins in the same Rack instance. But as Bruce alludes to you can, at least on some OS’s, if you are a bit technical, make two installations of Rack on one machine. I’m pretty sure that only one of them will be usable as VST in DAW (for Pro), and that should be the last installed one. So if attempting that on Apple Silicon machines I would do:
I have installed both versions on my Mac (notice this is a very old post) and it works fine. Only problem is they use the same autosave patch. But that can probably be fixed, too.
Good point! That should have been split apart like the name of the plugins folder.
For some unknown reason Intel version of VCV stopped running on my M2 Pro, Sonoma 14.0. ARM version runs normally, but it doesn’t have some valuable modules (Instruo, for example).
Any ideas on how this might be fixed?
What happens if you try to run the x64 version? Mine (2.4.1 x54 side-installed next to the arm64 one) still runs fine on Sonoma 14.2.1 on an M1 Mini.
I decided to fully re-install VCV and seems that it helped. What was happening is VCV just hang while modules was loading in browser. And also I decided to keep just x86 version for now.
Have you noticed any significant difference between ARM native and x86 versions?
arm native is much snappier, and no laggy browser which I see in the x64 version. I can’t qualify how much faster the arm64 one is, but it feels much smoother and somewhat lower CPU draw… I just keep the x64 one around for those patches that use not-yet ported modules… But Rosetta will go away some day not too far from now, if same as for the previous CPU switch holds true… So I hope Instruo and the rest not yet ported get their stuff ported before too long, so I can go full native I run the native one for the most part these days…