Terrible performance on M1 Pro 16 inch Macbook Pro

Hi

I am so glad you posted about this. I see all these reviews online about the amazing the speed of Logic is on an M1 - but it's not working for me.

I am having a hard time moving my music production from a 2017 Intel iMac to a brand new 16" MacBook M1 Max - 32GB RAM 1TB SSD. Monterey 12.0.1 and Logic Pro 10.7.1.

If I create a brand new project with Logic - it works fine. 5-7 tracks - works fine that I can tell.

If I open an old project (contains a modest 24 audio tracks) created on the old iMac 2017 Intel machine (which worked fine) -  it fails to open and I get s spinning beach ball - I have to crash it - it never completes loading. 

If I create a new empty project and them import the old project -  it opens but the playback speed is slow - sounds like its being played back at half speed. If I try and save the project  I get s spinning beach ball - I have to crash it - it never completes saving. 

All my projects have a sample rate of 96KHz - 24bit.

One of my old projects as a sample rate of 44.1KHz. It opens - I can play it - but the playback has clicks/pops in the audio.

I now have a very expensive machine that is underperforming by 2017 iMac.

Most of the plugins are not native and run in Rosetta. A majority of my plugins are from Waves and Native Instruments. Neither company has released native plugins. Neither company has committed to a timeline to releasing native plugins.

Looking at some of the suggestions online I have set the audio settings to their max settings. No change to any of the issues I am having.

OK - so I have been doing some more testing ....

Mac OS 12.1 update and the Apple Logic 10.7.2 that came out today did not resolve the issues I am having.

What did resolve the issue for me is launching Logic Pro in Rosetta mode. If you Get Info on the Logic Pro application and select the tick box "Open using Rosetta" - my projects open and play - with all the plugins loaded just fine.

So - give that a go if you're having issues with Logic on an M1 that is using audio plugin designed to run on an Intel CPU.

I'm looking forward to 2025 when all my audio plugins have been updated to Apple Silicon 😀

Unfortunately not. This is my performance on a ten track project mid verse 1. Dragged stems in. Vocal chain running on the vocal track and very little else. All compatible plugins aside from one Soundtoys instance. It's outrageous.

There is some sort of variable going on; I and some others have the M1/Monterey working not perfectly but very workably. Here's my processors on a ballad I'm producing, nothing very heavy, 12 audio tracks, probably 8 MIDI tracks, Kontakt piano, Omnisphere, Logic trumpet (which kicks ***, btw):

The usual complement of reverbs. No Waves plug-ins yet, nor UAD, but those don't seem to bog things down. NOTE, as I've said before, that if a track is selected on the left that has Kontakt on it, I get a processor spiking to 100%, and crackles and pops. Buffer at 128, in fact here's my settings overall:

My interface is a MOTU Ultralite Mk 4; I still think that if people are having bad issues, try running through the computer's internal speakers and disable the input just to eliminate your interface as a source of the problems. Truthfully I hope the performance gets better as the plug-ins get updated, but I'm working fine here and having less processor issues than I was having on Bessie, my 2012 i7 MacBook Pro. And again, I never expected to be up and running even this much; I figured January or February before things got updated in the 3rd party world enough to be seriously working. Running in native mode, not Rosetta. Just trying to post something from someone who has this working in case somebody can get some use out of it!

The_Producer_GRiT wrote:

I submitted my request, although I feel like they have hundreds (if not thousands) sitting in the queue.

Yes, I'm sure they are swamped, however.... I received a notice that the Apple group processing Feedback is on winter break and will not be back to work until January 3rd.

That said, on an older iMac running High Sierra & logic 10.4.4 I can run 4 instances of Alchemy plus an ES2 + effects at a 128 buffer with minimum processor use.

Well I just done a test to show the shocking performance of this.

I'm using a MacBook Pro M1 Pro 16”

They are both exactly the same project. Latest version of logic, macOS and the latest version of avenger. The image with high CPU is the project being opened in logic native mode (Rosetta not ticked) and the low CPU being opened in Rosetta mode (Rosetta ticked)

The difference is quite shocking…

Ok team - so as many among us here have tried many things - I thought I'd call Apple one more time - they're sending me off to an Apple 'Expert' tmrw at one of their stores - with the aim of replacing my MBP 16" M1 Max - HOWEVER, prior to doing this (which I'm reluctant to do b/c apart from this issue we all have, the Mac is running really well) they asked me to do one more thing - which I hadn't done before - and I'm wondering if anyone here has yet - and that was to "Reset All Preferences Except Key Commands" (see screenshot for where this is located) and SO FAR - in native mode and rosetta, I'm no longer getting any clicks & pops (which was always a daily occurrence!) Has anyone else tried this fix yet, and what was your experience?

Just to update this thread as well, I did some extensive testing with the Roland Jupiter-8 plugin as it was easily choking the whole system taking AUHostingService over the top.

The result is that the setting that has the most effect is to set the Process Buffer Range to LOW.

I can now run a handsome amount of very intensive plug-ins on my 16" MBP M1 Pro and the processing threads stay fairly balanced.

Of course this IS A BUG but I hope this helps some of you. It was driving me nuts!

It is also worth mentioning that the 256 for buffer was on average the best (apart from Roland System-1 that needs more)

I sincerely hope that someone can forward this info to the Logic team as I am sure they want to look into this.

I have mostly the same issue. Thought it was an issue with third party software, but after completely uninstalling ALL third party software from my new M1 Max 16 inch MBPro, the issue persists. I notice that performance is MARKEDLY worse when running Logic in Rosetta. Like, completely unusable worse. Only using Apple plugins and instruments, and my projects are crackling, popping, and completely crashing after about 3 tracks, with massive CPU spikes being the only warning that the project is about to crash.

What's going on?

It seems to be problems in general with the 10.7 release, I'm on an Intel MacBook Pro and also have these issues. I'm about to restore an older version of Logic Pro from TimeMachine and wait for Apple to fix 10.7

Couldn't agree more with you all and so so glad there's a thread on this that's slowly gaining some traction.

After dropping £3400 on a machine, it should fly through anything I throw at it. Instead I spent £1000 buying compatible plugins and totally reworking my workflow, and now I'm waiting 20 minutes for a 2 minute, 2 track song to export in Logic.

My old 2017 iMac would crunch through 150 tracks easily and never skipped a beat. Absolutely fuming that I can't do my job with this new Macbook.

As a previous poster said, using native plugins is fine, but they're actually slower than the Rosetta alternatives at this point and use 100% cpu at almost all times. It's a totally unacceptable move from Apple. Particularly after Developers have poured hard time into making sure they work with M1, and then for Apple to screw us with OS and Logic issues like this.

If anyone finds a solid work around please let me know because my day to day is absolutely insufferable right now.

I’m in EXACTLY the same boat. Same old machine, similar new machine, same plug-in issues, same glitches. Jobs like bouncing a two track audio file take an age. Tracking instruments is nearly impossible with the latency and then time aligning issues with that latency. Sometimes logic has even pitch shifted audio by half a semitone for some reason on the way in. It’s bizarre and for me shows a blatant disrespect to a massive group of pro users. UAD similarly are running poorly on M1 after a year and being one of the main industry standard interfaces. It’s so so so frustrating.

I have the same issue on my Intel MacBook Pro, it seems to be 10.7.x in general no matter what platform. My workaround has been to turn off Automatic Updates in the AppStore and to restore a previous version of LogicPro from a TimeMachine backup - it works fine for me and I'll be keeping an eye out for a fix from Apple (I have fed this back to Apple)

FWIW I'm kind of doing OK on my 14" M1, after some "growing pains" with my MOTU Ultralite 4 interface. I run Logic native (not Rosetta), with Spectrasonics, Arturia, Waves, Native Instruments plugs. One thing that was driving me nuts that I eventually tracked down was that one processor would spike to 100% from time to time using Native Instruments Kontakt and the Giant piano library. But this only happens if that track is the "active" track; I assume it's buffering like **** in case I decide to punch in and play. If I select a more neutral track, say a Logic instrument, it goes away. Performance isn't quite what I'd hoped, but processors hitting something like 40% (sometimes 15% on average), and I'm running my buffer at 128; can't play in on anything more than that, to me. SO, it's "possible", and my feeling is it really shouldn't work this well yet, since among other things, Native Instruments hasn't updated their stuff to M1 yet. I assume that this issue with the one spiking core when using NI Kontakt will likely be resolved when everything is recoded for M1...