Plans for Apple Silicon support?

I wonder if Neural DSP is planning to release Apple Silicon compatible versions of their software (and the Quad Cortex driver) as soon as the first Macs with the new CPUs hit the market or if we will have to wait a couple of months (or even years?) before we are safe to buy one of these machines.

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I hope so. I have to buy one

Me too. Itā€˜s a tough decision.

2020 iMac
pros: no compatibility problems for at least the next 2 years, upgradable RAM
cons: probably already obsolete in 2-3 years (low resale value in that case)

Apple Silicon Mac
pros: future proof, presumably new design, energy efficiency
cons: compatibility problems in the near future, probably some ā€ž1st generationā€œ hardware issues

Iā€™m SUPER curious about this as well. I know itā€™s a big ask for the team as theyā€™re already so busy, and I donā€™t expect day-one availability at all. But Neural Plugins are the only non-stock plugins I use along with Presonus Studio One (which I hope makes a version as well), so Iā€™m super curious about these developments. Might be the first time Iā€™ve turned back to Mac in a long time if all of this is possible.

I bought recently (right before they announced switching to arm) maxed out 16" MBP, and my hope is that the resale value will not go as low as it will be still best mac that runs native windows. Might be useful for some professionals.

Before we all get our panties in a twist someone has to test the Neural stuff using Rosetta 2. If that works it will give the Neural team some breathing space to get native support working.

In any case, if I were you I would not get an Apple Silicone just yet. I had the first two iPads and the difference was day and night from gen1 to gen 2 so Iā€™m expecting second generation Apple silicone computers to be released in one to two years and be a very significant improvement over current gen.

Our plugins work fine with Rosetta 2 in what we could test (DAW compatibility with Rosetta 2 did not allow us to test everything)

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I just got a respons from customer support today that there are NO PLANS to support the M1 natively!?!
Although Apple did a great job with Rosetta2, there is still a loss of performance when using it.
NeuralDSP plugins not running native also means that the DAW has to be run under Rosetta, which makes all other plugins run under Rosetta (The DAW cannot load plugins mixed between native and Rosetta), and that decreases performance of everything.

Considering how many producers and musicians that have or is about to upgrade to M1 equipped macā€™s, I cannot understand this decision at all!
I run several Neural plugins, and love them, but have now started to look for alternatives so I can get the full performance of my Mac studio.

Most larger plugin companies have already gotten native support for their plugins, and the rest has it planned for the coming months.

Todays response from customer service was really sad and hard to understand.
I get that Neural is not a large company compared to a lot of the plugin manufacturers, but this seems like a really odd decision. Alienating a large group of customers.

I really hope Neural reconsiders, and reallocate some of their resources to make native apple silicon support a priority.

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Yes, this is bad indeed. Neural is the ONLY plugins that I have that is not nativeā€¦

I have a macbook pro m1 pro, and I can use Neural DSP Plugins in Ableton Live without using Rosetta mode.

In fact, using the Component (AU) instead of VST solves the issue.

I do not use Abelton, but tried that in both Reaper and Studio One, and had A LOT of issues with the NDSP plugins when trying to use AU while not running under Rosetta. Sound dropouts, tempo syncing not working etc, so that was not a viable option.

M1 has been out for well over a year now, and not even PLANNING to support is a big FU to all the Mac-users that want to upgrade their rig, and those who already have.

I had several questions about running Logic natively on M1 and running NeuralDSP plugins (or other intel plugins under Rosetta), so I setup some test projects to see what was possible and the rough performance differences between Rosetta and native plugins.

My main takeaways are that you can run Logic in native mode and run both native and intel plugins (under rosetta). The native plugins are much faster (especially when opening projects) and use less CPU. If youā€™re interested in the (unscientific) tests and the details, I posted a video of the process:

Iā€™m surprised Neural DSP Support said that. What were their exact words?

There really isnā€™t a way around this for Neural DSP as Apple will eventually (probably sooner rather than later going by their past behavior) drop support for Rosetta and Neural DSP will still want to keep selling their plugins.

That said, chances are itā€™ll be a really difficult port for them to do as they (and any 3rd party libraries they may be using) are probably doing a lot of CPU-specific optimizations and one doesnā€™t merely recompile that kind of thing for a completely new CPU architecture.

I could point at other plugin vendors who have already shipped native M1 support, but one should also bear in mind that the Neural DSP plugs do a LOT more than my favorite synth, compressor or reverb :smiley:

Now if I really wanted to put the cat amongst the pigeons: Should Neural DSP be focussing on porting their plugins to the Quad Cortex or to the M1? grin.duck.run

Hey all!

Just wanted to chime in here that there seems to be a misunderstanding. Our team is currently working on developing M1 native versions of our plugins, however, we donā€™t have an ETA at this moment to share.

We appreciate everyoneā€™s feedback and patience.

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Nice communication.

I hope it will end the bad rumours.

And take your time for a good M1, Iā€™ve used some synths that have been badly ā€œportedā€, and they are eating more CPU on Native that on Rosettaā€¦

(And I know that itā€™s not so that easy for some libraries to be ported to M1 Native, so some code to re-do).

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The exact wording. But I see they have cleared up the ā€œmisunderstandingā€ below. (The reply I got was not open for interpretationā€¦)

I donā€™t really have an opinion on porting for the Quad Cortex, it seems a bit counterintuitive, but the algorithm/model for the plugin amps should definitely fint their way to the Quad Cortex. :wink:

Although I understand that NDSP probably have a complicated job in porting the plugins, there are a lot of advanced plugins that have already been ported, so it is a matter of prioritising.

As you can see from my screenshot of the mail from support, that was NOT what was communicated at all, so maybe give a little feedback to them?

Thanks for letting us know that they were wrong :wink:

Hey!

Thanks for the feedback, I shared it back with the team on communicating clearly for M1 porting.

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