Tracking Apple Silicon Native Hosts, Plugins, Effects

[echosystm]

There was a mention of Apple Silicon support with the new Presonus Studio One 5.2 release, but I'm not sure if it's truly native or just better compatibility. Thought I'd mention it anyway.

Edit: Nup, this uses Rosetta

o Compatibility with Apple Silicon based Macs (using Rosetta 2)

I maintain my prediction that we will not see the major DAWs (Logic excluded) go native until at some time in 2022. We will, however, see compatibility fixes that allow the major DAWs to work better with Rosetta2.

That said, if there is one DAW that stands a chance to go native sooner, it is Bitwig. It is already cross-platform, with a Java frontend, and a much younger and better organized/architected code base. That should make porting much simpler than a DAW with decades of cruft. Their main challenge will be the 3rd party libraries they use in the underlying audio engine for things like audio stretch. Also, I imagine there's some x64 assembly that will need to be ported.

Fingers crossed.

AFAIK, there is no Oracle JRE/JDK for Apple silicon. That is a pretty big blocker for BitWig. Ironically, they would have probably been better off using something else for their front end. For example, if they had used C++ and QT, recompiling for ARM would be trivial.

Java is trash for desktop apps anyway and that's coming from someone who was a Java dev for many years. It's one of the reasons I will never use BitWig. You have you have your principles.

[george]

u-he Hive 2.1 seems out of beta and available as U2B ARM/x64 at their website https://u-he.com/products/hive/hive.html

Hornet Plugins has announced U2B for AutoGain Pro MK2 (verified as U2B ARM/x86 but not signed, which may cause issues) https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... n-pro-mk2/

NuSofting updated daHornet with U2B builds but without demo cant' be verified https://nusofting.com/plugins/dahornet/

[fgimian]

There was a mention of Apple Silicon support with the new Presonus Studio One 5.2 release, but I'm not sure if it's truly native or just better compatibility. Thought I'd mention it anyway.

Edit: Nup, this uses Rosetta

o Compatibility with Apple Silicon based Macs (using Rosetta 2)

I maintain my prediction that we will not see the major DAWs (Logic excluded) go native until at some time in 2022. We will, however, see compatibility fixes that allow the major DAWs to work better with Rosetta2.

That said, if there is one DAW that stands a chance to go native sooner, it is Bitwig. It is already cross-platform, with a Java frontend, and a much younger and better organized/architected code base. That should make porting much simpler than a DAW with decades of cruft. Their main challenge will be the 3rd party libraries they use in the underlying audio engine for things like audio stretch. Also, I imagine there's some x64 assembly that will need to be ported.

Fingers crossed.

AFAIK, there is no Oracle JRE/JDK for Apple silicon. That is a pretty big blocker for BitWig. Ironically, they would have probably been better off using something else for their front end. For example, if they had used C++ and QT, recompiling for ARM would be trivial.

Java is trash for desktop apps anyway and that's coming from someone who was a Java dev for many years. It's one of the reasons I will never use BitWig. You have you have your principles.

I'm a Python dev in my day job and completely agree regarding Java, but strangely when I tried Bitwig, the GUI seemed quite responsive and fluid.

Still, QT would have been a way better choice imho; or honestly, just dropping Linux support and using native tools on macOS and Windows for the GUI like most other DAWs.

[teilo]

I'm a Python dev in my day job and completely agree regarding Java, but strangely when I tried Bitwig, the GUI seemed quite responsive and fluid.

Still, QT would have been a way better choice imho; or honestly, just dropping Linux support and using native tools on macOS and Windows for the GUI like most other DAWs.

I think the idea that Java can't have a responsive UI is a relic of the past. Bitwig uses LWJGL for the UI, which is plenty fast (think of Minecraft). But it also helps that Bitwig is only using Java for the UI. The underlying audio engine is all optimized C code which communicates with the UI via TCP on a local socket.

In any case, Oracle Java may not be native, but there are two or three OpenJDK distros that are already native. The main issues are that Bitwig uses Java 12 which will never be ported. They will need to update to something more recent, which won't be that difficult. For example, Azul has native builds for most Java versions from 8 on in JDE, JRE, and the FX variants. LWJGL 3 is available in an early release. So really, we are pretty much already there on Java.

[HoRNet]

Hornet Plugins has announced U2B for AutoGain Pro MK2 (verified as U2B ARM/x86 but not signed, which may cause issues) https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... n-pro-mk2/

Just a clarification, the bundle is not signed while the binary itself is. right now it works in BugSur on the M1, tested with Logic Pro and Reaper beta.
This is needed because of our watermarking procedure that is applied at download (every download is "signed" with the email of the buyer) if Apple decides that this is not fine anymore we already have in place a procedure to re-sign the bundles on the fly, we just have to buy some mac mini server somewhere to do the signing before downloading...

Oh BTW we also have other plugins M1 native:

https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk4/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk2/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... ncpressor/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... ngkey-mk3/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/hornet-autogain/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... lm128-mk2/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... n-pro-mk2/

Saverio

[george]

Cool thanks for the clarification Saverio great work

[Bombadil]

Should do a thread for the MIAs.

[teilo]

Oh BTW we also have other plugins M1 native:

https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk4/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk2/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... ncpressor/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... ngkey-mk3/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/hornet-autogain/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... lm128-mk2/
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... n-pro-mk2/

Saverio

Yep. Already had these listed. Thanks for confirming.

[teilo]

Should do a thread for the MIAs.

That would be a massive list. Maybe just the notables, like everything relying on iLok, Everything Native Instruments, Arturia, and Plugin Alliance.

[Ploki]

given how quickly my plugin list is becoming native (sans iLok stuff) i picked devs fairly wisely.
so, none of the above.

[Bombadil]

Hive 2.1 still opens as if it's an Intel au, with a little graphical hiccup in Native Mode. At least that's what I'm seeing here.

[Tronam]

Hive 2.1 still opens as if it's an Intel au, with a little graphical hiccup in Native Mode. At least that's what I'm seeing here.

It's probably not a reliable indicator of whether a plugin is native or x86. I think it's just a behavior of Logic's 3rd party AU hosting service.

[Ploki]

Hive 2.1 still opens as if it's an Intel au, with a little graphical hiccup in Native Mode. At least that's what I'm seeing here.

You need to restart or rescan, else logic keeps loading rosetta version or something

[george]

Frozenplain has updated his Terracotta Mirage Kontakt instrument with U2B compatibility but AFAIK Kontakt itself is not Universal 2 Binary I have contacted the developer for an explanation about that and I still hope KVR takes some action about this issue.

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/terrac ... rozenplain

[Ploki]

Yah. Tone Empire advertises “M1 compatible”.
No shit, literally everything i had was M1 compatible via rosetta from the get go.
DrumSpillage last updated 2014 works flawlessly via rosetta.
Really hard to get straight info about this