Terrible performance on M1 Pro 16 inch Macbook Pro

In my experience one of the problems ıs Alchemy. Deactivating it or completely removing calms down the cores. I tried it it in all available quality settings but the result is the same. Lots of thread jumping even when the song is not running.

I just received my Mac yesterday. I went through and set everything up and I am having the same issues as everyone else. The CPU is constantly spiking, crackling noises, lagging, etc. I first thought it was my third party plug-ins but that isn't the case. Even with stock Logic plug-ins it does the same thing. I am a minimalist with my music and only use about 16 tracks (at most) on my tracks. I was expecting better performance but instead it is basically unusable!!!

I went from a 2015 Macbook pro running Catalina which was flawless to a $4000 paperweight. I watched numerous videos about how great the new Macs were with Logic. I feel like I was lied to by multiple people about how great this machine is.

On another note opening web pages takes forever! I have tried multiple browsers and it does it with all of them. I did a speed test on my old 15" 2015 Mac and this one and my 2015 is about twice as fast. How is this possible with this machine? I bought the Max model too!

Is this an OS issue or what? To say I am ****** is an understatement. Apple needs to fix this and FAST! I can't understand certain third party plug-ins causing these issues but for Apple products and their own plug-ins causing these issues is absolutely unacceptable IMO! This is bulls***!

I thought I was going nuts, but at least I've found that I'm not the only one with these issues. I have a brand new M1 Max, 10 core, 32 GB, and I'm running several Intel plugins and it's basically impossible to get through a playback with all the glitching, crackling and crashes. The plugins that have been causing this are EZDrums, Arturia instruments, and Neural DSP Archetype plugins. I reached out to Apple Care Logic experts and it seems that they're barely collecting info on these issues from users. I'll try the Rosetta mode, but It's just frustrating that the plugin companies are releasing brand new plugins and versions that are not optimized for M1. The best we can do is reach out to them so they know it needs to be updated, and it's not just user ignorance. I'm going to send Arturia, ToonTrack and NeuralDSP e-mails and links to this thread. Thank everyone for sharing your experiences, I was about to return my MacBook thinking it was faulty.

Same problem apple MacBook Pro M1 Mx 32 gig, 10 cores. When on speakers it glitches and pops all over the place. The button I use to hold the window in place to see the midi discounts itself and I have to keep pressing it each play to follow the midi, so frustrating, all my midi notes record double. I am using only Komplete and a few plugins from Accosonus and Izotope. Also crashes quite often.

For the record also a nightmare with Traktor had to edit code on the cmd prompt just to get into it to turn of multicore threading. Isn't that the whole point of spending this small fortune?

I’ll throw my hat in the ring - 13” M1 MBP 16GB. Antelope Zen interface (has its own host of issues we won’t go into today…).

I migrated from a Pro Tools HD rig to this laptop and had such impressive initial performance that I packed up the tower and rack units and put the old system up for sale. Now, I feel like I’m trying to work on a ten-year-old laptop; constant popping issues, dropouts, MIDI problems, plug-in issues, crashes, “quit unexpectedly”, etc. I can no longer use my hardware process (Logic mix out through my hardware EQ/comp/summing mixer) without first bouncing the session offline, because it’ll click and pop into my stereo out and render a mix unusable. I am constantly cycling the buffer size and basically living at 1024 unless I need to, you know, actually track anything with minimal effects - which initially wasn’t an issue at all.

Today’s new fun thing is I can’t load Logic with more than one MIDI device connected, so my Prophet and my Novation controller can’t be active at the same time. Logic won’t even load in any of the safe modes until I disconnect one.

I did bump to 10.7.2 but am still in Big Sur, having read many warnings about a Monterey move right now. Though with Logic performing this way, I might just try it.

I‘ve spent a LOT of time observing CPU core behavior and trying variations (day job as software QA analyst helps here!) and have no findings on cause yet. I do observe that it’s typically one core peaking out almost immediately, and some cores report zero usage, and it’s not consistent across plug-in types or manufacturers. There’s also another issue with bus latency compensation where I can’t use my usual, say, reverb and delay send structure because the output of those busses is significantly delayed - and I have cycled and reset the delay compensation.

Apologies for the vent without much in the way of solution - but as an audio professional with decades in the DAW space, something is really really wonky.

I have a similar issue but with Xcode + simulator, the machine keep the Icestorm cores at full load and the rest of the CPU keeps sleeping. This is causing the machine to be slow (but wait, it does not freeze), probably because the scheduler is busy with other processes and the system has to wait the Icestorm cores to finish the proccess, while the Firestorm cores are asleep. This is not nice at all.

To everyone here, please open Activity Monitor, right click over the icon and Monitors -> Show CPU usage / Show CPU history. Check if the firs two columns are all blue (my case), I assume these are the Icestorm cores.

@tannercundy

I think the problems I am have are due to not starting up in Rosetta. I have many Native Instrument plugins and checking some are just not ready to work with Silicon. I will test this when I get home. Not sure if this helps you at all https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014683497-Apple-Silicon-M1-Compatibility-News

So I will say Rosetta does make a big difference. The issue I had was it wasn't prompting me to install Rosetta since it was technically "compatible". There was no method of downloading online. I had to run a a command in terminal to install it, only after searching everywhere for an option. Once I did that I was able to check the run in Rosetta option for Logic. Everything is stable at the moment while running in Rosetta. It is completely unusable if you don't do this.

I’m having the same issue with my Max 64. I’m currently talking to a rep at Apple about the issue, and they’re saying they are unaware of any issues. I don’t know if I believe that though, but If you haven’t reported the issue make sure to do so everybody.

This is vexing indeed. When I first got my Max I tried loading a template that I use for online jamming. It crackled and popped worse than rice crispies and yet my far cheaper Intel MacBook Air (yes I said Air) runs it with absolutely no problems.

Today I installed Surge-Xt and wanted to make a track with it, which I did.

At some point however, it started to fall over worse than I've ever seen it.

Right now it lives in a 25-bar loop, and if I start playback from the drum track, it will occasionally work. Any other track, nope. It doesn't even make it through one whole bar.

I'm linking to it here so that anyone else with Surge-Xt may try it for a laugh.

If you're a home brew user you can simply install it for free using

'brew install surge-xt'

Or download the DMG with a quick web-search.

My MacBook Air once again plays this glitch and hassle-free and it really puts this M1 Max to shame. I don't understand it.

64GB RAM and 1 TB SSD should not be outshined by a bloody Quad Core I7 with 16GB RAM. Am I right or am I right?

anyway, if anyone feels brave enough to try this project in their Logic, be my guest.

[Link Edited by Moderator]

Similar issues here! Unacceptable coming from a company like apple who supposedly tailor their products for professionals.. My macbook pro 2021 is slower than my macbook from 2014!! Do something apple!!!

Just chiming in to say that Logic is essentially unusable on my 2021 M1 maxed spec 16" MBP. Like others it pops and cracks, randomly crashes, doesn't like to communicate with the audio interface and one of my MIDI controllers. It doesn't matter if I run it in native mode or Rosetta, and use only Apple M1 native plugins or 3rd party plugins. I know it's Logic too, because I don't have these problems when I run stand alone versions of other apps. I hope Apple fixes this soon because this computer was an unholy level of expensive, and it's really quite unacceptable that a flagship program like Logic should perform so poorly.

We have to contact Apple directly because they don’t read these forums. It is important that we put pressure on them to sort it out, it is absolutely not acceptable but it’s worth noting the fault might not all be Apples. Some interfaces haven’t been updated to work with these machines.

So I just opened up my MacBook Apple care case again. My M1 Max can’t handle basically the easiest session. The person I spoke with the other day, had no idea about this even being an issue, and we did a complete walkthrough and troubleshooting test. This was while they screen shared to see what was up on my end. After we disabled all my plugins and vsts, we only used logic stock vsts and plugins. We got the a sessions to cpu spike at around 4-5 tracks, followed by crackling noises. After that we cleared the preferences folder. Which helped slightly but nothing crazy. Today I reopened the case, and once again they were completely unaware of this being an issue. I recommended that they search themselves in places like this thread. After the gentleman looked at my case notes, he was very enthusiastic about bringing the case to engineering. I will keep you posted, and recommend each and every one of you make this call, the more of us that speak up, the more they will work to fix it. Please don’t slack on this everyone.

Are you within the time period to take the Mac back? You have 2 weeks to try it and 4 if it is faulty which it basically is at the moment. You are absolutely right to open cases with them but I have had this issue with them before and they also kept denying they had ever heard of. Littleraly hundreds of website including Forbes, Mac world, Washington post had written articles on it and they still kept deny they had heard of it. This was back in 2019 when the MacBook Pros cracked and popped like crazy when the battery was down a bit and it wasn't plugged in. I tried 5 different laptops and they all did it with logic and just it's native plugins, it also happened with on iTunes and YouTube. I concluded they were trying to pack too much power into a little machine. sent it back and stuck with my 2015 MBP.

Now I bought a new one but sent it back as I genuinely need a bigger hard drive and am awaiting the new one speced to the max in most directions (possibly foolish), I am praying this isn't going to be an issue again.

BTW look up M1 memory leaks if you haven't.

Please everyone do report the cases.