by humbledrone on 5/6/25, 3:40 AM with 188 comments
by humbledrone on 5/6/25, 3:40 AM
In that thread, the topic of macOS performance came up there. Basically Anukari works great for most people on Apple silicon, including base-model M1 hardware. I've done all my testing on a base M1 and it works wonderfully. The hardware is incredible.
But to make it work, I had to implement an unholy abomination of a workaround to get macOS to increase the GPU clock rate for the audio processing to be fast enough. The normal heuristics that macOS uses for the GPU performance state don't understand the weird Anukari workload.
Anyway, I finally had time to write down the full situation, in terrible detail, so that I could ask for help getting in touch with the right person at Apple, probably someone who works on the Metal API.
Help! :)
by humbledrone on 5/6/25, 11:46 PM
https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/productive-conversation-appl...
by AJRF on 5/6/25, 3:09 PM
The team we talked to at Apple never ever cared about our problems, but very often invited us to their office to discuss the latest feature they were going to announce at WWDC to strong arm us into supporting it. That was always the start and stop of their engagement with us. We had to burn technical support tickets to ever get any insight into why their buggy software wasn’t working.
Apples dev relations are not serious people.
by krackers on 5/6/25, 8:03 AM
Seems like there might be a private API for this. Maybe it's easier to go the reverse engineering route? Unless it'll end up requiring some special entitlement that you can't bypass without disabling SIP.
by LiamPowell on 5/6/25, 8:44 AM
by threeseed on 5/6/25, 9:58 AM
1. Go through WWDC videos and find the engineer who seems the most knowledgable about the issue you're facing.
2. Email them directly with this format: mthomson@apple.com for Michael Thomson.
by vessenes on 5/6/25, 3:11 PM
by sgt on 5/6/25, 11:10 AM
by philsnow on 5/6/25, 8:12 PM
> Lol on the second day it's out, you have already absolutely demolished all of the demos I've made with it and I've used it every day for two years
by phkahler on 5/6/25, 4:32 PM
by Someone on 5/6/25, 9:51 AM
Is that a limitation of the audio plug-in APIs?
by jonas21 on 5/6/25, 4:42 PM
Perhaps there's something in this video that might help you? They made a lot of changes to scheduling and resource allocation in the M3 generation:
by charcircuit on 5/6/25, 11:33 AM
>The Metal API could simply provide an option on MTLCommandQueue to indicate that it is real-time sensitive, and the clock for the GPU chiplet handling that queue could be adjusted accordingly.
Realtime scheduling on a GPU and what the GPU is clocked to are separate concepts. From the article it sounds like the issue is with the clock speeds and not how the work is being scheduled. It sounds like you need something else for providing a hint for requesting a higher GPU clock.
by dgs_sgd on 5/6/25, 6:38 PM
That's quite the hack and I feel for the developers. As they state in the post, audio on the GPU is really new and I sadly wouldn't be holding my breath for Apple to cater to it.
by PaulHoule on 5/6/25, 2:40 PM
by chrismorgan on 5/7/25, 9:54 AM
That looks to be a smoother chalkboard than I’ve ever encountered. If I had been using such chalkboards, I suspect I’d agree, but based purely on my experiences to this point, my opinion has been that chalkboards are significantly better for most art due to finer control and easier and more flexible editing, but whiteboards are better for most teaching purposes (in small or large groups), mostly due to higher contrast. But there’s a lot of variance within both, and placement angles and reflection characteristics matter a lot, as do the specific chalk, markers and ink you use.
by ramesh31 on 5/6/25, 2:39 PM
by rock_artist on 5/6/25, 8:39 PM
Ableton engineers already evaluated this in the past: https://github.com/Ableton/AudioPerfLab
While I feel for the complaints about the Apple lack of "feedback assiting" The core issue itself is very tricky. Many years ago, before being an audio developer, I've worked in a Pro Audio PC shop...
And guess what... interrupts, abusive drivers (GPUs included) and Intels SpeedStep, Sleep states, parking cores... all were tricky.
Fast forward, We got asymmetric CPUs, arm64 CPUs and still Intel or AMDs (especially laptops) might need bios tweaks to avoid dropouts/stutters.
But if there's a broken driver by CPU or GPU... good luck reporting that one :)
by notnullorvoid on 5/6/25, 7:07 PM
by thraway3837 on 5/6/25, 1:31 PM
Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but still never allowing the basics that every other developer platform has made possible on day 1.
A broken UI system that is confusing and quickly becomes undebuggable once you do anything complex. Replaces Autolayout but over a decade of apps have to transition over. Combine framework? Is it dead? Is it alive? Networking APIs that require the use of a 3rd party library because the native APIs don’t even handle the basics easily. Core data a complete mess of a local storage system, still not thread safe. Xcode. The only IDE forced on you by Apple while possibly being the worst rated app on the store. Every update is a nearly 1 hour process of unxipping (yes, .xip) that needs verification and if you skip it, you could potentially have bad actors code inject into your application from within a bad copy of Xcode unbeknownst to you. And it crashes all the time. Swift? Ha. Unused everywhere else but Apple platforms. Swift on server is dead. IBM pulled out over 5 years ago and no one wants to use Swift anywhere but Apple because it’s required.
The list goes on. Yet, Apple developers love to be abused by corporate. Ever talk to DTS or their 1-1 WWDC sessions? It’s some of the most condescending, out of touch experience. “You have to use our API this way, and there’s this trick of setting it to this but then change to that and it’ll work. Undocumented but now you know!”
Just leave the platform and make it work cross platform. That’s the only way Apple will ever learn that people don’t want to put up with their nonsense.
by Liftyee on 5/7/25, 12:27 AM
by SOLAR_FIELDS on 5/6/25, 11:04 AM
by throwaway48476 on 5/6/25, 5:13 PM