Of course, it doesn’t really work like that in the real world – my electronic kit has to output the midi which takes a couple of milliseconds, the midi data has to be processed by the computer and then the program can send out the audio data to the drum module (which is being used as the audio interface as well). Thats faster than if I was sitting behind an acoustic drum kit where my ear would be 2.5 feet (76cm) away from my snare. So thats like saying if my computer was the snare drum, my ear would be 12cm away from the drum and it would hear it 0.4 ms after I’d hit it. That is 0.4ms output latency.Īudio travels at roughly 1 foot (30cm) per thousandth of a second (1 millisecond). I know those are great figures for most people, as I’ve spoken to many PC owners who get much higher figures than that, and much bigger latencies, but (without wishing to sound like an advert) thats why I use Macs.īut with this new M1 Mac, I can run Addictive Drums in stand alone mode at the very smallest buffer size of 16 samples. If I was running lots of other audio, I might have to lower it to 256 samples / 5.8 ms latency. This was so that the computer would have a chance to catch up and the audio would be clean – if I lowered it anymore then the audio would break up and go crunchy. On my old Mac, I would run stand alone VSTi’s like Superior Drummer 3, EZdrummer 2 and Addictive Drums 2 at an audio buffer size of 128 samples/ 2.9ms output latency. And everything runs on it, even though I was told by a few companies that their software wouldn’t.īut what makes this really, really special, is how it performs with drum VSTi’s/ plugins. In the last week, I got around to setting it up. The new Mac turned up a few weeks later (the lead time suddenly went from a few days to a few weeks) and the box was not opened for quite a few more weeks while I finished some stuff and decorated my studio.

I’d keep my current Mac Mini for audio work (as it is great) and everything would be good.

Bingo! It looked great for video work and that was my biggest concern. All hail, the reigning king of low latency drum plug-in performance…ĭue to lockdown/C19 I have found myself doing more video work and my 2014 Mac Mini wasn’t really up to the job of video editing, especially as I want to work in 4k, so I decided to look into replacing it last November.Ģ4 hours later, Apple announced the new M1 Macs.

New macs in 2018