Silly Experiment - Cantabile on M1 iMac

[Peter_Garlick]

For various reason, I changed from windows to iMac M1 and sadly, in the process, said goodbye to Cantabile.

I also installed parallels which allowed me to run the early release of win 11 for arm, which I needed in order to carry out some vital activities only available on Windows. … Well, vitally important old games that I like to play.

Given the complexity of some of the games in terms of hardware, the inevitable thought occurred - I wonder if Cantabile would run on the M1.

So, I duly installed it, grabbed a couple of free VSTs and tried to fire it up … and much to my amazement I found that it works!

I don’t pretend that I have done any sort of exhaustive testing as I only did this for a giggle, and I really don’t want the licensing aggro of shifting any of my real VSTs over to allow me to test more thoroughly, but everything I tried actually seemed to work fine.

I just thought that it might be interesting information for others.

[cpaolo]

So you are running two emulations, (M1 -> Parallels -> WoA -> Win x86 -> Cantabile + VSTs), and working? That’s amazing.
Did you try any heavy VST? Just curiosity.

[Peter_Garlick]

Yes, that is exactly what is happening. I really didn’t expect it to work, it was more of a ‘I wonder if …’ sort of moment.

The only VST I tried was some freebie synth one, because as I said earlier I don’t want to mess about with licensing issues on my real ones. If you can suggest a free-to-download VST which eats resources I will give it a try.

[JimboKeys]

@Peter_Garlick

If you can suggest a free-to-download VST which eats resources I will give it a try.

Pendulate is a fairly CPU-intensive free monosynth - you could try building an 8-part poly out of that.

[Torsten]

@Peter_Garlick

If you can suggest a free-to-download VST which eats resources I will give it a try.

see this post - I built a little performance test song using the free Tyrell vst synth

Feedback computer config

OK, I knocked together a quick one: simply download Tyrell from here, install it and download the following song file: Perftest.zip (11.3 KB) Before loading the song, set the audio engine in Cantabile to “Null Audio”, 256 samples @ 44.1 kHz , then load the song “Perftest”. Let it run for a while to settle performance and report back on time load. Also report your system spec (CPU etc.). Let’s see the results come in! Cheers, Torsten

you can see in this post how this performs on non-emulated systems - should be a pretty hefty test for your emulated setup.

Cheers,

Torsten

[cpaolo]

Yep, The test that Torsten talks is sort of “our standard” way of rating a PC performance.
Five Tyrrell instances can stress the processor.

[Peter_Garlick]

Hi,

I gave this a go, and here are some screenshots. I did notice the fans had started up, so the machine must have been working quite hard as I never normally hear them at all.

Cantabile Running the test:

Windows Resource monitor:

iMac Memory pressure:

iMac CPU load:

W11 Machine Config from Parallels:

The iMac is a 2021 Apple M1 with 16GB of memory.

Hope you find the info useful,

Best regards,

Peter.

[Peter_Garlick]

oops, forgot one:

[Torsten]

Interesting! TBH, I’m surprised that you are getting results at below 100% average load for this setup

But with this kind of time load, I wouldn’t use the setup in a real-life gigging situation; looks like the whole emulation layer is eating up a ton of the M1 performance. My little Live Cube is sitting comfortably at around 31% with this and never peaks above 35% - natively, an M1 should be able to beat this.

So this Parallels solution is probably more an interesting engineering lab result than really usable in a live situation - but thanks for giving this a try and for sharing with us!

Cheers,

Torsten

[Peter_Garlick]

I agree with you on it being ‘an interesting engineering lab result’. As I said at the beginning of the topic, it really was just an idle moments thought ‘I wonder if …’. I was quite astounded when it actually fired up and ran!

Still, it was a bit of a giggle doing it.

Take care and all the best,

Peter.

@brad Apple version? Please?

[Derek]

It sure is interesting to see it working, but a little on the edge for live use. But if you like living dangerously on stage…

[Peter_Garlick]

No way I would even consider using it for live work Derek, using it wouldn’t be living on the edge, rather inviting disaster.

[cpaolo]

Not bad considering the poor M1/MacOS that emulates WoA, which emulates Win x64.
Not useful, but still an interesting experiment.