Pro tools system turnover
Thought it was time to share some thoughts and spec. info on the new system Ive just finished setting up in the studio. Hope you will find it useful and maybe spare you of some troubleshooting.
My old system was based around a Mac Pro cheese grater and Avid Hdx. All in all this system has been solid as a rock and has served me well for many years. The cheese grater is a truly workhorse (and electricity hog) and I probably would have stuck with it, if I had been able to upgrade the OSX properly. Since I couldnt do this, I was not being able to upgrade Protools either, and was stuck on 2019.12. This lead to alot of challenges when opening session, sending back sessions etc. that I just could not work with anymore.
So in late 2021 I was ordering a Mac Mini M1 and some different accessories. The actual week when the M1 arrived at the dealer, the new Mac Studio was released. Thanks to my audio dealer I was able to replace the mini with a Mac Studio. I am so glad I did this and didnt stick with the Mini.
The Mac Studio is a Max model with 64gb of RAM and 1 tb harddrive. Even though I have the computer in a machine room, I could easily have stored it in the actual studio, as it is dead silent.
I am now using the Mac Studio with 3 displays. 1 main for edit, 1 for plugin window, and 1 display (projector) for video. Main one is connected through HDMI. Second one through a J5 dual usb gpu, and third display through a Thunderbold input (Sanberg USB c to hdmi adaptor). The plugin display connected to the J5 gpu, is having delay issues. Cursor is lagging and perfomance is slow, when I try to tweak plugins or select specific settings and presets. I will have to work around this until I find a better solution. Maybe another simple usb/hdmi adaptor will do the trick.
I have my PT Sessions and video running on a Blackmagic ssd rack connected to TB. All is running smoothly here, and the Blackmagic box makes it easy to swap out a new ssd drive if needed.
I have no less then 12 hard drives and dongles connected to an ICY box usb hub and the mac studio. Among these, I have a 5 hdd unit Orico harddrive bay connected through TB. This is set up to JBOD mode.
Protools is running steady. Havent had a single crash with PT2022.5 (yet).
Hdx is placed inside an Avid thunderbolt rack connected to Mac Studio. With some minor Hdx tweaks everything is good here too.
Installing plugins was time consuming but mostly without any problems. Most of them just work as before. A few of them are showing some weird problems.
No problem plugins so far:
Altiverb
Fabfilter pro eq
Waves sound design suite
Grm Tools Classic collection
Mcdsp Futzbox and E300
Eventide Anthology collection
kontakt instruments
Reaktor
Izotope plugins
Problem plugins so far:
Sound Toys V5 (audiosuite plugins are resetting when I select and go from a stereo to a mono clip. System is lagging and being slow when ST plugins are opened )
Omnisphere synth (error messages keep popping up, telling me that plugin cant find or make the waveform. Some sounds just dont play at all).
Besides the above, Im running Soundparticles without problems. Soundminer is having trouble playing back sounds when Rewire is on, resulting in long delays in showing waveform, and playing back the actual sounds. The workaround here is to switch off Rewire amd everything is back to normal again..
