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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
