Native Instruments Apple Silicon M1 Compatibility

Damn

antidebugging code 😂

Maciej Repetowski

He is not wrong about Windows, though.

Windows backwards compatibility is almost legendary. Probably the only thing I’m envious about having a PC 😉

Damn

maybe the antidebugging code prevents NI from further development?!??

mezzurias

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/20760#Comment_20760

Well that seems to be slowly changing. MS seems more willing with Windows 11 to drop compatibility and I think its only going to get worse over time. Probably because MS has been slowly making overtures to join the ARMs race (as it were) and dragging all that legacy code is causing issues for them in the transition.

Anyway back to NI. I think my issue is that NI has always been slow. There has never been a time in my recollection where they've been ahead of the curve in-terms of supporting new technology. Meanwhile their contemporaries try to be at the forefront. NI is not doing anything inherently special compared to say U-He. U-He with their small team have at least beta support for newer tech weeks after its announced. I think the biggest issue for NI is that a lot of the devs who worked on their biggest products are no longer there and they didn't pass on the baton.

I'm sure NI would love to start from scratch again on some of their products but they can't because that would piss off customers more than when they dropped Kore.

Maciej Repetowski

NI is a large company and those are less agile than smaller developers. I think they should have ported their “engines” first: Kontakt, Komplete Kontrol, Maschine and Reaktor, to allow the use of relevant libraries and expansions.

Kontakt is native, so they are 25% there 🤣

I think those are more business decisions than anything else. Shift to VST3 was announced 16 years ago by Steinberg. HiDPI monitors are around for several years now. Apple also announce any architectural changes at least few years in advance. It’s probably “why spend money and manpower now, we have time” and then the cutoff time comes and everyone is caught with their trousers down 😉

In June 2018, Apple deprecated Open GL. It still works on Mac but is not advisable. 4 years later, literally every plug-in maker is still using Open GL instead of Metal APIs. Once Apple finally stops supporting Open GL, there will be another drama unfolding 🤪

Kubrak

antidebugging code - code that makes debugging/reverse engineering harder, it may use exceptions and features that are unique for given CPU type...

Open GL-Metal - why should one invest resources if not needed, now. And Apple might come with Wood in few years, or move back to Open GL and investment would be wasted.

And generally, any change is asking for problem, why to risk it?

It is Nice that Apple announced AS ahead. But one needs computer with that CPU, compiler that works correctly, DAW that correctly works on AS natively, ...... One may prepare things beforehand, but not all

Maciej Repetowski

If Microsoft would announce that they will deprecate an API, as a programmer - would you still use it, knowing that they will abandon it eventually? Honest question.

Calagan

ok. Could someone explain me what are the main issues in recoding plugins for Apple Silicon compatibility ?

And why it was so quick with many software devs (actually, most companies from my plugin folder) and so slow for few : NI, Reason, SSL or Sonimus (to quote few exemples) ?

I understand that some codes, for any strange reasons, can be more difficult than others to update, but I remember reading some comments from Matt Hill (founder of Liquidsonics) saying that the main issue of late devs was keeping old and not optimized code instead of constantly optimizing products (something any decent company should do).

I don't find any pattern in the slow devs caractéristics to explain why they still didn't update their plugins to AS : some are big (NI, Reason), some are little (Sonimus, Boz Digital labs, Black Rooster) ; some have complex stuff (NI, Reason), some have very simple tools (Sonimus, Boz Digital labs again, Black Rooster)... etc. etc.

The only similarity I see : most of these devs don't update their plugins very often and are just exploiting old stuff the longest possible (Boz Digital Labs and Black Rooster excepted - I think the reasons are different for them but I don't want to digress while this post is already too long). NI is still not able to release vst3 versions of 15 years old flagship products, Reason almost didn't change in 10 years if you except some few real innovations like the plugin rack and the use of 3d party plugins (I started with version 5 and I'm using now the latest 12 version, so I know what I gained in 10 years), Sonimus didn't release any update of Satson since 2017 !

So it seems that if NI was so late in starting to release VST3 plugins (15 years after Steinberg announced the new format) and unable to update its plugins to AS, it's simply because they don't care, they were lazy and optimized the regular incomes instead of the long term usability and "future-proofing" of the tools they are selling.

There's no technical justification for that. It's just a business choice.

By the way, I just gave them another 125€ this summer in order to get kontakt 6 and some new stuff (mainly Noire, Guitar Rig 6 and the Electric Sunburst Deluxe). And I just found that Guitar Rig 6 has a latency issue, where the correct latency is not reported to the host (Ableton Live in my case) and produce combfiltering when used in paralllel or in an AUX (maybe only on my system, I don't know because after one week the support still didn't answer me).

So of course I'm a dumb customer. Maybe the problem is they've got too dumb customers, who knows...

Maciej Repetowski

Three main reasons for slow transition to Apple Silicon:

1. plug-ins protected with I-Lok had to wait until Pace released native driver for Mac, which they’ve done only recently.
2. old and not updated code, old libraries, Intel-centric code (AVX, etc.) - NI falls into this category, IMHO
3. PC-centric developers which provide Mac versions as an afterthought (Apple users are cash cows for them, nothing more) and can’t be bothered to code properly in accordance with Apple guidelines, use proper APIs, etc. - to find them, just check any forum for developers who are loud about Apple “breaking things” 😉

mezzurias

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/20782#Comment_20782

Apple had Apple Silicon developer machines well before they released the first commercial Apple Silicon machine (M1 Air). You could get one directly from their developer site as long as you had a developer account.

As for Metal support. Apple has been developing Metal since 2014. That's 8 years. It's not going anywhere. So if you are invested in the Apple ecosystem you should be supporting Metal. If for nothing else that it can perform better than doing the graphics drawing of your VST/DAW/whatever not the CPU. You act like Apple just dropped Metal on developers out of nowhere which isn't the case.

Just like CoreDraw and the other Core apis still exist, Metal will be around for a while. The fact that Apple is building their own GPUs should make the pretty obvious imo.

mezzurias

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/20815#Comment_20815

The ironic thing for me about this is if NI would have focused on refactoring and making their software less Intel-centric they could have released Maschine Plus on an ARM chip and had something that had more bang for buck for the cost of the SoC they put in the thing. There was a reason they went with an almost 12-year old Intel Atom SoC, they had no choice.

Maciej Repetowski

What he said (both posts) 😉

As I always say, if developers want to support Apple, they have to follow Apple guidelines and use Apple APIs and be proactive, not just sit on their laurels, because “it works with Windows” or “it always was this way”, etc.

Apple = Xcode, Metal, Apple APIs and HUI guidelines. Same like with any other non-X86 platform, if one wants to code for Android, one has to follow Google guidelines, simple as that…

Otherwise, please do not bother - we, Apple users, will be better off without your half-baked efforts 😂

One can use JUCE, for example, and generate plugins for both Mac and PC, in VST2, VST3 and AU format easily. There is also CLAP coming, which can do the same, so there are ways to generate code which can be easily recompiled for various platforms and plug-in formats.

mezzurias

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/20818#Comment_20818

Well hopefully Soundstacks will put them on better footing in the future. Its made by the creator of JUCE so if that's any indication SoundWide is at least taking steps to address some of these issues even if it won't bear fruit for a while.

Maciej Repetowski

Let’s hope so, cause I really want to have new shiny Mac Studio or Mac Pro (when it arrives) and NI is the only company holding me back, everything else I have is AS native already.

Well, except for IK Multimedia, but I decided to ditch them altogether, pesky little buggers 🤣

Mutis

NI has been changing for a while (the lay off, M+, this new forum… and from being x86 centric into AS as a priority) and my gut says that some products may be drop in some moment in the future (pissing off some users) but let’s hope it comes when renewed alternative arise (with Soundwide frameworks help) so no truly harm hit the userbase (maybe we are in the worst moment). Chip shortage is accelerating “the shift into efficiency” (like oil peak for electric cars) and Apple has been buying business related to design and manufacture chips since long ago (there are news up to 2008 about that and not to mention they were one of the ARM creators back in the day) so they can control their releases better than when they were tied to Intel roadmaps.

The thing is x86 as platform seems like PPC back in the day but for the whole industry aside gaming and workstations (which aren’t musician market anymore) so called “trucks” will be still a thing (even for Apple) but not the “mainstream”. BTW Workstations aren’t so profitable than they were (and Apple built their own based on AS and MacPro should emerge at the right spot in the future). Most of the “local resources” (inHouse servers, GFX, storage…) had been “cloudsized” from long ago (from dropbox/iCloud to Nvidia gaming cloud or AWS, etc) so a low wattage very optimized device (not only tablet shape but even desktop) seems the bet for the future.

Few years ago playing fortnite on iPad was a joke like encoding 8k video… but not anymore.

Bruteforce vs Efficiency.