Currently I'm running a mixing project using MIR Pro 24 on the new Mac Pro, so I haven't had the chance to really test this using Logic with VI's etc. But I'll let you in on what I've found about using Pro-Tools 11 and MIR Pro. (Notice how everything has the word "Pro" built in these days :P).

So far running Pro-Tools with MIR running in plugin mode using about 20 instrument spots has made a CPU impact of around 35-40% .. which is just awesome :P, means I cnould potenially throw in a LOT more plugin's and even way more spots on MIR. I have the 24 track version of MIR so there's a limit in plugin mode but when I test this on Logic I'll be using VE Pro and I'll be able to have a lot more instruments running via seperate instances of MIR. That review will come shortly.

It's hard to really pin down anything to say about the new Mac .. it runs amazingly, and performance for audio mixing so far has been flawless. I haven't really had that much experience of running MIR on other computers so it'd be hard for me to say whether or not it's faster, punchier than on other systems, but it runs very well. Any changes to the mic positions, settings etc are rendered within a few seconds if not instantly and one is left with the distinct impression of being able to get on with the work, rather than having to wait for the computer to do it's thing while you go make some coffee to pass the time:P

I'm also running a bunch of Steve Slate Plugin's .. Virtual Tape Machine, Master Bus Compressor, (I would be running Console collection and FG-X but both of those are not yet available for AAX 64), as well as Vienna Suites EQ, Multiband compressor, Exciter and Limiter. And of course running some of the AVID plug's like Channel Strip. On the iMac I could not really run too many instances of Virtual Tape Machine without red lining the CPU's (Without running MIR), whereas on the Mc Pro, even with a full session I'm barely touching at 45-50% power .. and that's with MIR running. Making changes in MIR, even loading new room packs while music is still playing works nicely, there's hardly any performance drop, no clicks and pops an the instruments under MIRx make their positional changes with no effort at all.

Summing up this short review, running MIR under Pro-Tools just works exceptionally well. Nice workflow .. no sense of having to wait or to have to read a book while you wait for stuff to load, you can just get in there and get on with your work within a minute of opening up the pro-tools session. Personally I need that, If I get an idea I wanna try out I don't wanna wait 5 minutes for the computer to boot up, Pro-Tools to load and all the data to find it's place. The Mac Pro boots up within 15-20 seconds, Pro-tools and a full session can load within a minute (loading MIR and positions) and I'm off to the races. Under my old system loading the same session, from deciding to turn the computer on, could take upto 5 minutes.

Note: I found that my Pro-Tools was having hanging issues when i first started using it .. I later found that this was because I had one of my Hard Drives (USB3.0) hooked up to a USB2.0 interface .. this will cause severe speed problems, so make sure any external media is connected via USB3.0 or thunderbolt devices only! Kinda obvious I guess .. but sometimes these things happen and we don't know why .. it's awesome when you find out though cos everything works then :P

I realize you all want to know, how this system performs running VI's, VE Pro, MIR and everything all at once .. and I'll be doing that next, in fact later today I'm loading up my film score template (for the project I'm working on) in order to make changes now that it's all on my new Mac .. so stay tuned .. I'll have a performance review of that shortly. But it's safe to say that if you're interested to mixing audio only, with CPU intensive plugs, the new Mac will ace this! No question .. workflow is flawless!

Hey Hetoreyn, 

All this is very useful to know. I would appreciate it if you could drop a note here regarding your Logic usage with your new Mac Pro. I assume it's no. X. I haven't purchased it yet, I am about to, but I'm reading many frustrated users' bug complaints in the relevant fora, so it would be great to know a few things from you first hand. What OS are you using? I had to revert back to Mountain Lion when Mavericks made my 32GB 3.4GHz iMac run like a maverick instead of a jungle cat....

Anyway, I look forward to hearing about your Logic experiences when you have a moment.

hetoreyn,

Have you experiened any weird ADC issues while using MirPro24 as a plugin?  I'm running ProTools 10.3.8 on a Hackintosh (10.8.2), and have had a fairly bad experience with timing issues.  VSL tech support has said that PT v10 has ADC issues, so I haven't really been able to ascertain exactly where the issue lies - seems to be a combination of VSL and PT.  Running MIrPro definitely works - but when I have other reverbs added on Aux's, such as Exponential Audios PhoenixVerb - which has latency of like 43 samples typically - when run with MirPro it has latency of over a thousand samples...  But, aside from that, I've just had weird timing issues in general.

Have you experienced any of that?

Thanks!

- Greg

Hello friends,

I am seriously considering to get a new Mac Pro now - 6 core or 8 core? - I still wonder. For editing video the 8 core seems perfect - for the use with MIR Pro maybe the one with the faster Processors? I use Logic x and some other processor hungry libararies - which I am quite sick off because of the better performance of VSL lol ("Diamond" is a nice word but often only illusion). The strongest point for the the Mac Pro is the ability to connect the libaries hrought thunderbolt but I am still not sure if I will have a real gain in performance compared to my 12 core 2,6 Mac Pro from 2010 with 48 RAM and 2 SSDs.

No new quesion - sorry - but I am still hungry for information. 

Thanks in advance

Alfred

I dont know if it is true, but what it is said is the new 6 core Macpro is equivalent to your 12 core 2010 Macpro and you gain 10/15 % if you go to the 8 core (not shure if my memory of the 10/15 % is good, but it is a small amount)

Thanks for your reply Cyril, so it doesn´t make sense from the audio-production point of view to get this expensive computer? 

Hey folks .. sorry this review took so long .. been up to my ears in work so it's been hard to find time to actually test the Mac Pro for the music stuff we want to see it do.

The most taxing session I've tried to put my Mac Pro (Spec can be found in above posts), through is having Logic open with 4 instances of VE Pro, each of those running part of the VSL library .. all on the Mac Proo .. no other slave devices. I wanted to see just how much it would handle. And on each of those VE Pro's, MIR is running for all instruments. So as you can imagine that's some serious processing going on there with around 50 VI's all told and all going through MIR. Didn't really work flawlessly at first .. it went through that process of having to play and replay in order to cache the library sounds but after a while I found it worked pretty well. It's probably a bit much to expect this kind of setup to work flawlessly from any high end computer as it's really a lot of calculation going on but it proved that it could do it if needed. Perhaps if one were running two intances of VE Pro you'd have absolute smooth performance.

I have the 6 core mac so I can't speak for the really REALLY high end macs which no doubt could run this kind of big orchestra set up with no real hiccups. I had intended to use my iMac's as slave devices so for me that just showed that if I had to get rid of my iMacs .. I could make do with just the one machine .. but I'd rather run VE Pro over the thunderbolt network (nice to have one of those now) and save all the main power for plugin's in logic, or Pro-tools. I didn't encounter any problems with ADC, or with timing issues .. which I had expected but didn't see. I have had my Mac Pro running sessions of Logic with VE Pro without using MIR and this is so smooth it's safe to say that it's jsut perfect to work with a big orchestral template. If you simply plan to use MIR at the recording stage (Pro-Tools or other) then for sure you'd save yourself some hassle. Of course if you can afford to buy MIR for all your slave devices and room packs then you won't have this problem :P

So, the main thing is that VSL sessions with a regular complement of plugins' (Reverb, processing etc.) will work extremely well. Big sessions with MIR are going to tax the system but it still ran at a level which I found comfortable to work with after the initial memory caching thing had been done.

Performance in Pro-Tools is as yet unknown with VE Pro etc .. gonna have to look into that at some point. I've been meaning to get rid of logic for a long time now and Pro-Tools 11 is beckoning me along. (I'm just pissed with the stupid glitches that Logic keeps having .. on any of my machines that Apple haven't yet addressed.)

It works, and works well. Definitely the right machine for me in any of my music projects. Coupled with my two iMacs I've got a killer combination here :D (Slave music stuff on one side ... and Doom 3 running on the other :P).

P.S.

Just as a side note .. the Mac Pro will not run windows 7 on boot camp. It can only run Windows 8 and above. Which sucks or me becuse I have 7. Okay I was only using it to play games but I was really looking forward to loading up Skyrim on this baby and maxing out all the settings. So just be warned if you plan to run Windows in Boot camp for any reason, you will need Windows 8.

@Sakamoto said:

Thanks for your reply Cyril, so it doesn´t make sense from the audio-production point of view to get this expensive computer? 

Strictly speaking no .. You can do audio production (Mixing, tracking, mastering etc) with just about any decent computer these days. The Mac Pro is very expensive and should really only be considered for jobs that require very intensive CPU, RAM and Hard drive usage. If you intend to run tonnes of VI's and processor plugin's it makes sense to consider it as 1 Mac Pro will probably suffice for all your needs (as oppose to using several computers linked together).

As I've said above I'm also using mine for Video editing and now also 3D art rendering so my Mac Pro is getting a good workout. Just using it for things that any good iMac could handle would be a waste of it's time and of your money.

MIR was in stereo ?

Try with 5.1 or 7.1 to see ;)

Not much point doing 5.1 .. as I don't have a surround setup .. and have absolutely no idea how mixing in 5.1 then bouncing down to stereo is any better or worse than simply mixing in stereo. And like I said .. I can't monitor surround so it's a pointless thing for me.

The test in 5.1 and 7.1 It is just to see how your new Macpro is reacting when playing.  All the test I have done are in 5.1 and 7.1 because they are more CPU demanding 

In French we say ; qui peux le plus peut le moins !! :)

I understand the desire to see a test in 5.1 .. but as I say I don't have any way to monitor and know pretty much nothing about how one sets that up. Surround is just one of those things that no one has ever satisfactorily described how to use properly, and how it all helps in the world of stereo headphones (which is where most of our music ultimately will end up!). I assume yes, it uses much more CPU power .. but I can imagine my 6-core mac pro being able to handle a good sized orchestra in MIR.

Mind you, because of my desire to have a nice swift workflow and not so much arsing around inside of VE Pro, I prefer to run MIR as a plugin within Pro-Tools, and utilize MIR's capabilites in a straight forward audio mode. This is largely due to the constraints of my studio .. only having the one license means MIR is bound to only one computer. When (and I do say when!) I have acquired a much bigger, and way more expensive studio setup .. and a hollywood film that'll pay for it all :P .. then you can be sure I'll be working in Surround .. with about 6 high end Mac Pro's doing all the work!

As I've previously stated I use my Mac Pro for not only music, but video editing, and 3D rendering as I've just gotten into 3D art and animation. The demands of editing 4K footage (or higher), or for rendering an animated scene in hi-def are considerable. If you've ever tried to render an animated scene, even short, you'll know that even a 5 second scene can take a whole day to render .. even on a good computer. The question most people are asking is .. 'Will a Mac Pro speed up my workflow and allow me to do more?' .. to which the answer is definitely yes.

Is it worth the money? .. hard to say since the more advanced computer users will no doubt prefer to build their own hot-rod system and it's quite possible you can make a similar spec system for less than the cost of the Mac. Mind you, Apple REALLY threw in every high end thing they could. The data throughput in the Mac Pro system has very few, if any, bottlenecks and gets things done pretty damned fast. The only real bottleneck you'll come across is when you attach storage to the unit .. I'd suggest investing an a Thunderbolt 2 SSD drive since that will offer the greatest amount of workflow satisfaction. But even with a decent USB 3 drive things work nicely.

At the time I'm writing this, it's become apparent to me that the Mac Pro must run everything .. the idea of using slave devices is nice .. but not very practical in my studio. For the reason that a lot of my projects utilized different setups and so every time I want to open up an old session it requires me to transfer key licenses, and to reconfigure the setup in Logic to keep up with it all .. which takes ages. I'd rather have it all accessed through one machine. And frankly the Mac Pro handles any and all of the music sessions I have any of my previous computers through.

So what of the iMac slaves?? Well .. they make excellent monitors for my Mac :D (2 x 27 inch LED screens aint' no bad thing). And my i7 iMac is also now my main 3D rendering machine .. since it's going to sit there and do bugger all for most of the time.

And of course there's the main reason to buy a Mac Pro .. cos it looks f***ing awesome :P. Why buy a Honda Accord .. when you can buy an Aston Martin :D