Terrible performance on M1 Pro 16 inch Macbook Pro

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.

it might be time to start posting about these problems on twitter or Instagram and tagging apple. I’m tired of hearing “we’re unaware of any problems like this” and also, the “we don’t check the discussion threads” even though they really should is absolutely ridiculous.

Two things happened today.

1. I got a response from feedback I submitted via the Logic feedback form, from an actual human! Well, his name's Mike, and he wrote like one, but who knows what AI's Apple have cooked up these days?

Anyway, he asked me for a project that fails, so I sent one, along with the feedback report from the Logic help menu.

2. MacOS Monterey 12.2 is out today, currently downloading as I write this (so better hurry up) and one can only hope with fingers crossed, that this has undocumented fixes for Logic Pro.

There's nothing at all about it in the changelog, but when the original M1 MacBook's came out, they too, had audio dropouts and glitches, and that got fixed with one update but I don't recall which one.

Eagerly awaiting an install and reboot to see what happens.

I mean it surely can't get any worse, right?... Right?

Have I just killed it forever?

Since the Monterey update did help squat; Another question. Has anybody managed to install an older Logic Version e.g. 10.6.x one the M1pro/max MBPs?

The M1 crowd says, that everything was good until Version 10.7 came along.

So thats my last hope at the moment.

I'm curious whether people are seeing this behaviour with new projects as well as older projects? I'm noticing that, so far, brand new projects seem to run okay (though I haven't developed anything far enough to have any really large, new projects, at this point). I have one particular older project that's giving me a lot of trouble, and which has to be finished soon. So I tried creating a new project and importing all content from that older project, and the problems are reproduced. So it isn't strictly a project file issue. That project is pretty big and pretty detailed, but it runs fine in Logic 10.6.2 (for some reason).

I've double-checked overall performance in Studio One v5 (latest native Apple Silicon build) and it seems good—though of course, working on an actual large-scale project brings in a lot of tracks, instruments, automation tweaks, and so on, so any kind of "toy" test project probably isn't a fair gauge of real-world performance. (This would also apply to any test projects, started in Logic 10.7.2.) But I've searched the Presonus forums for complaints and haven't found anything worth noting (i.e., no threads like this!). So, this suggests that the machine itself is probably okay.

That said, I have also noticed some funkiness just running Apple Music, now and again, which seems really weird.... it will get into situations where dropouts appear, periodically, separated by about 10-15 seconds of normal playback. I've also noticed some weird changes of level(??)—specifically, the overall playback level getting louder. Since Apple Music is basically doing nothing, and must use the most basic methods for playing audio on the system, I'm thinking something is up with Monterey. Though that doesn't explain why Studio One seems okay (and Dorico, and Wavelab), of course... It's a real head-scratcher...

I have been doing some more testing.

I had audio issues with just playing audio files that were stereo and 24bit 96Khz. The audio played with pops and clicks.

Playing directly within Quicktime player seemed to work. Playing the same audio track within any other audio player produced issues.

This issue seems to of been resolved as of Mac OS Monterey 12.2. I can play any stereo audio track in any player and it plays fine.

Still have issues with Logic playing my older projects - but as I have stated earlier - works when Logic is put into 'Rosetta' mode.

Opened at case with Apple - did not go anywhere. I think the AI realised that resolving my issue will not help Apple sell more iPhones so it put it in the 'too hard' basket.

Well, though I have noticed some Big Sur users having troubles with Logic 10.7.x, I don't think Logic itself is broken in any deep way. There could be some new system-level process management to do with Spatial Audio, for example, that's causing buggy behaviour in certain cases, even without Monterey in the picture. But having audio glitches when loading a website, and without any dedicated audio software running, definitely suggests there's an issue with audio at the system level. It's not hard to imagine Logic pushing on that same bugginess more dramatically than Apple Music...

As for Logic needing a whole new code base, I definitely don't think it's anywhere near that dramatic. Anything messing with the audio thread will cause this kind of behaviour. Once that's sorted out, it will run as well as it ran before—and then some, of course, on new hardware. With audio it can be (and often is) a very small detail that causes these kinds of horrific sounding issues—the actual issue isn't necessarily a big thing at all (and probably it isn't, which is why it snuck through in this kind of bug).

Besides, a whole new codebase for Logic would take years, so let's hope it's not that serious. Also, there's at least one user here having problems in Ableton. So again, it's looking like the OS, not Logic in particular.

No, I haven’t heard back from apple myself. After having a case in. But I was able to manipulate to Focusrite clarett eight pre-pluses, into submission with logic, lol I don’t like the interface of the focusrite software, it’s nowhere near as intuitive as personas, but nonetheless after a pretty much six hour trial and error, I have everything recording with no cracks and pops. What are the things that everybody should look out for, is preferably to try to save your recording to at least 48 kHz. Like create a template, that has your recording set, the audio MIDI set, and whatever interface you’re using, to 48 kHz. Buffer size doesn’t matter after that honestly. What does matter is that logic actually sees a saved file, with 48 kHz. My next feet is going to be, how to figure out how to make all of the channels pan to the center when I create new ones. I had that issue in Big Sur, and I ended up having to reinstall logic for it to go away, but I’m not doing that again.

Okay, sadly I spoke too soon. When I tried it last night I wasn't in my studio, and could only test with the built-in audio. On my Audient ID-22 (USB) this morning, playback is about the same disaster it was before.

Switching to built-in audio it's much better, but I still get occasional clicks. Also, watching the Performance Meter, with nothing playing back at all—i.e., the transport stopped—I'm still seeing random CPU spikes on the last thread. Switching from 8 threads to 10, the spikes move to the 10th (i.e., last) thread, but just keep going. Re-launching Logic the spikes go away, but only until I playback once. From that point on, the spikes are continuous, whether I'm playing audio or not.

This is ridiculous. I don't have time to do a thorough plugin debug test right now, but I'll try to do that either tonight or tomorrow morning. I did get notified by Softube that all their plugins are now "officially" compatible, but updating made no difference.

Nah, that's just ignorant. I've been using Logic for close to 30 years and it's been solid for me the vast majority of that time. Maybe if you're using it mainly as a tracking DAW(?)—I'm not sure, since that's not my thing, but for a composer/producer it's pretty much ideal. I've tried other platforms (Cubase, Studio One, even Ableton), but I always go back to Logic to get actual work done. That's not to say the others are somehow insufficient, I just prefer Logic's particular combination of features and UX. There are a bunch of great "pro" DAWs out there now, to be fair, so people have options, which is great. But claiming Logic is becoming "kiddieware" is nonsense.

That said, these 10.7.x performance problems are insanely frustrating. I'm just glad I have my copy of 10.6.2 to fall back on. Zero problems with it, so it's obviously possible for Logic to run properly on this hardware... the devs just have to work out what's going on. It's clear that we're among a relatively small group, unfortunately, since if this was more widespread we'd have heard more about it by now. That can make it really hard, because the devs may not even be able to reproduce the problems. My biggest concern is that it's a bad batch of chips or something (though I realize that wouldn't explain why 10.6.2 runs fine).

I think the best way to get assistance here is to simply contact Apple Support directly, via their support page for Pro Apps. You can either do a chat session (which is a good choice if you want to be able to do other stuff while you're chatting with a support rep, and plus you get a transcript of the conversation), or you can do a phone call. While the first support person probably won't be very helpful with extremely technical issues, you can eventually get to an "Apple Senior Advisor," and those people really know their stuff.

And BTW, I watched a couple of YouTube videos comparing the performance of a Mac Studio (M1 Ultra) running Logic using all native plugins via a mix of native and non-native. His Mac Studio could play back 140 tracks using some non-native plugins, but well over 500 with all native plugins. I would expect that number would be lower with fewer cores, but keep in mind that single-core performance on an M1 Ultra chip is basically identical to that in a base-model M1.

I also experience horrible performance.

Everything you mentioned plus other issues:

• Massive waiting time when unplugging or plugging headphones *Logic has to reload Core Audio.
• 3rd party Plugins open when I move them or duplicate them within mixer. *Very laggy, very annoying.
• Ramdon crashes.
• Slow overall performance.

Sadly, I have to open Logic with Rosetta II, and although more stable, it is not faster than my old 2014MBP 16GB. Very sad.

I only use original - native Silicon 3rd party plugins.

My gear is Macbook Pro 14-inch. M1Pro. 32GB.

Kasper - as far as i know, if AUHostingService is active, it means that plugins are being run through Rosetta, even if Logic is in Native mode, so the fact that you are seeing AUHostingService implies that some of your plugins are not running natively (as far as I know?) and maybe this is causing issues?

Please report back so we can all learn!

thanks

In my case mostly yes. Don't have Serum though to test. Only tricky one in the Roland collection is System-1.

Again encouraging everyone to report to the LPX team via feedback. This needs their highest priority.

http://apple.com/feedback/logic-pro.html

Edit: So you know Apple owns Logic, but this is Apple Logic Pro forum. There is not any other forum as close to Apple as this. Logic Pro does not have a separate forum somewhere else.

The Problem is not M1 Pro or Max by the way. All other DAWs I use have no problems at all.(Cubase.Ableton Live)

What makes it weird is, Apple owns the hardware, the OS and the DAW, yet Logic is the worst performing DAW on M1Pro/Max