Yeah, when I started out with the first Intel Core Mac Mini, I bounced down most of my effects-heavy tracks, though I did this pretty begrudgingly. Fortunately Logic has a great feature where you can "Freeze" a track to a "bounced"/rendered audio file -- if you want to make edits to the effects, you can un-Freeze, make your changes and re-Freeze. Only downside is, this takes up precious time when you're trying to be creative/productive. :)
These days everyone expects to be able to just layer on 8 effects on every track but.. that's a pretty recent luxury. Back when computers weren't really powerful enough out of the box to do stuff like that you could get dedicated DSP cards like Universal Audio's "UAD-1" PCI card, which let you use really high quality effects on your tracks without overloading your CPU. Now they have newer Thunderbolt/USB-based outboard stuff to do the same thing.
Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before. It takes a while for all the third-party software vendors to update their stuff and make it run smoothly, assuming the software team is still in business or still working on that product. There's a ton of great stuff we'll never get new updates of. This is why you'll sometimes find pretty old computers in musicians' homes... There's still one cool granular synthesis app I can think of for Mac OS 8/9 (th0nk) which was never updated for anything newer, for example.
I remember seeing ProTools and other audio workstations around my city still running on old 68K Macs for years after the PPC transition because they worked, had crazy-expensive licenses, and were treated more like racked equipment than traditional computers.
Absolutely. That is more the rule than the exception for professional recording studios. Still happening, too. If you bought into many thousands of dollars of gear for Thunderbolt, for instance, or FireWire, the computer is only one small piece of that system, and becomes part of the racked equipment.
Yeah, audio/musician guys I know were using PowerMac G4 towers years into Apple's "Intel" transition. And yeah, "upgrading" means basically tossing away a perfectly good $1k piece of software and paying nearly as much for an upgrade license.
Oh, they actually allow you to download it for free now, IIRC. Maybe they just figure it's so obsolete, no one would bother to port it to a newer system? To be fair you can get the same effect with newer granular synthesis software manually, th0nk was just cool in how you never knew what you're going to get out of it, leaving the result to chance.
> Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before.
Worse, you also can't know in advance IF your existing hardware will be supported on a new system. That has bitten me once with an E-MU 0404 USB audio interface. The fine folks at Creative never bothered to release a production driver for Vista, let alone Windows 7 or later. Needless to say, I don't buy Creative products after that.
On the Mac side, I could only imagine them getting advance news of the M1 and going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
These days everyone expects to be able to just layer on 8 effects on every track but.. that's a pretty recent luxury. Back when computers weren't really powerful enough out of the box to do stuff like that you could get dedicated DSP cards like Universal Audio's "UAD-1" PCI card, which let you use really high quality effects on your tracks without overloading your CPU. Now they have newer Thunderbolt/USB-based outboard stuff to do the same thing.
Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before. It takes a while for all the third-party software vendors to update their stuff and make it run smoothly, assuming the software team is still in business or still working on that product. There's a ton of great stuff we'll never get new updates of. This is why you'll sometimes find pretty old computers in musicians' homes... There's still one cool granular synthesis app I can think of for Mac OS 8/9 (th0nk) which was never updated for anything newer, for example.