El Capitan?

[Babz]

From here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/sp728?locale=en_US


Metal
Supported by the following Mac models:

MacBook (Early 2015)
MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
Mac Pro (Late 2013 and newer)

Like I say, it may not be a factor in anything, just a wild guess on my part, but here's the info. FWIW.

[Morpheo]

I believe El Cap was the first Mac OS to take advantage of the "Metal" graphics API. But only certain Macs, generally 2012 or later models, can take advantage of it. This could possibly explain different performance for different users. But I'm far from a boffin in this area. I could be way off. One would hop that "not able to take advantage of" doesn't mean "slower performance if you cant take advantage of", but who knows with Apple. I am definitely concerned when I hear people saying their performance suffered after the El Cap upgrade. Anything that slows you down in any way is not a proper upgrade.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)

There's not a single application that takes advantage of Metal. Only the Finder uses it, with the right video card that is. Which means most Macs out there are incompatible. Photoshop still uses OpenGL, and from what I gathered (I could be wrong though) our audio apps would require major rewrites to be "Metal-friendly", so much that I don't see Avid or Motu be bothered with it anytime soon.

So far Metal has been nothing more than a marketing joke. It may be useful for certain tasks in the Finder but that's all. I did read that the El Capitan/Metal combo gives impressive UI performance.

[mikehalloran]

So I have 2 Macs that support it. Hmmmm... who knew?

[Babz]

Well, apparently Metal is mostly hype at this point. I only know about it from watching WWDC keynotes. It was initially developed for iOS and the keynotes featured all these fancy games with advanced graphics. When El Cap was announced Apple made a big deal about Metal being available for the first time on Mac OS, and there was talk of Adobe Metal support coming soon. But apparently "soon" hasn't arrived yet. Anyway, at this point I doubt it has anything to do with Shooshie's beach balls or other El Cap performance issues. But different performance for different users could be due to some other thing like that.

[zuul-studios]

I believe El Cap was the first Mac OS to take advantage of the "Metal" graphics API. But only certain Macs, generally 2012 or later models, can take advantage of it. This could possibly explain different performance for different users. But I'm far from a boffin in this area. I could be way off. One would hop that "not able to take advantage of" doesn't mean "slower performance if you cant take advantage of", but who knows with Apple. I am definitely concerned when I hear people saying their performance suffered after the El Cap upgrade. Anything that slows you down in any way is not a proper upgrade.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)

There's not a single application that takes advantage of Metal. Only the Finder uses it, with the right video card that is. Which means most Macs out there are incompatible. Photoshop still uses OpenGL, and from what I gathered (I could be wrong though) our audio apps would require major rewrites to be "Metal-friendly", so much that I don't see Avid or Motu be bothered with it anytime soon.

So far Metal has been nothing more than a marketing joke. It may be useful for certain tasks in the Finder but that's all. I did read that the El Capitan/Metal combo gives impressive UI performance.

It was the "Metal" folder that I was referring to in my earlier post to this thread. The "Metal" folder can be found in the Contents folders to the following Adobe applications: 1) Premiere, 2) After Effects, 3) Prelude, and 4) Media Encoder. There might be more applications that utilize this "Metal" folder, I'm just not aware of them at present. What is important to know is that this is now a known issue with Adobe, and that removing the "Metal" folder (it is an actual folder containing sub-programs, or whatever they're called) makes the above-mentioned applications work again. Finding the "Metal" folder really is not a difficult process, and deleting the folder is simple too.

I don't know who, here, uses any of the Adobe applications. But if you have an older Apple computer using the effected NVIDIA graphics cards, similar to my set-up, and use these Adobe applications, expect the need to remove the "Metal" folder if/when you upgrade Apple's OS to 10.11.6.

Ugh!

[mikehalloran]

https://www.reddit.com/r/editors/commen ... _a_kernel/

[remmet]

The biggest problems in El Capitan for me have been:
1) the spinning wheel. Damn thing is always spinning. I lose more time to that thing, and I NEVER saw it before El Capitan. I have a 12 core Mac Pro with 40 GB RAM. It should handle anything. My original Macs were faster in terms of workflow. They responded pretty much in real time. This thing makes me wait for everything.
Shooshie

Just curious - did you ever find a way to resolve the spinning wheel issue? I've got the same problem, and it seems to be getting worse, i.e., it happens with increasing frequency and the occurrences require force quitting more and more often. And with the additional frequent problem of Kontakt freezing while loading, I'm just about ready to get creative with a sledge hammer.

I've got a mid-2010 Mac Pro 12-core with 64 GB of RAM. Running El Capitan 10.11.6.

Richard

[HCMarkus]

The biggest problems in El Capitan for me have been:
1) the spinning wheel. Damn thing is always spinning. I lose more time to that thing, and I NEVER saw it before El Capitan. I have a 12 core Mac Pro with 40 GB RAM. It should handle anything. My original Macs were faster in terms of workflow. They responded pretty much in real time. This thing makes me wait for everything.
Shooshie

Just curious - did you ever find a way to resolve the spinning wheel issue? I've got the same problem, and it seems to be getting worse, i.e., it happens with increasing frequency and the occurrences require force quitting more and more often. And with the additional frequent problem of Kontakt freezing while loading, I'm just about ready to get creative with a sledge hammer.

I've got a mid-2010 Mac Pro 12-core with 64 GB of RAM. Running El Capitan 10.11.6.

Richard

Why not modernize? Your Mac will run Sierra (and High Sierra when it arrives). Sierra is working great for me.

[remmet]

Why not modernize? Your Mac will run Sierra (and High Sierra when it arrives). Sierra is working great for me.

Okay, I switched to Sierra. Following that, it took ten minutes into my current DP project for the spinning wheel to appear again. It didn't stop so I had to force quit. I haven't had time yet to see if the spinning wheel is worse with Kontakt (which seems to be the case), and if as before, it appears in other (non-audio) programs as well.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I noticed that things started getting worse after I changed two items in the studio:

1. I bought a refurbished mid-2010, 3.06GHz 12-core Mac Pro. With 64 GB of RAM and 2 SSDs for samples, I thought the computer would be performing amazingly well. Running diagnostics indicates that everything is fine. But something is clearly amiss.
2. I replaced my old MOTU 1224 with an Apogee Ensemble (Firewire) interface.

I truly envy those of you whose systems are working flawlessly. I'm just at a loss trying to figure out what to do.

Richard

[Shooshie]

The reason I do not move past El Capitan is broken software. It is my understanding that Photoshop and Illustrator (CS6) will cease to work when I do.

It took some hacks to get those apps to work in El Capitan. I'm not sure the same hacks will work. For one thing, they require an old Java runtime or something like that. It's been long enough that I no longer remember how I did it, though I'm sure I can scrounge up the instructions somewhere.

I'd just upgrade the apps, but I'm also told that Adobe moved to a subscription based license, and I'd be paying them monthly for products I use intensely for a while, then not at all for a few months, then intensely again... etc. I do not want to learn a replacement for Illustrator. I'm pretty good at it. To attain this state in another app would take years.

Also, I don't know how Microsoft handles the new OS. I use Excel (version 14.7 from an original 2011 install), and it's very important to me. Nothing else will do. (Apple's "Numbers" is nice, but not adequate)

If I could be assured that all those can be made to work flawlessly in Sierra, I'd upgrade tomorrow.

Shooshie

[mikehalloran]

The reason I do not move past El Capitan is broken software. It is my understanding that Photoshop and Illustrator (CS6) will cease to work when I do.

It took some hacks to get those apps to work in El Capitan. I'm not sure the same hacks will work. For one thing, they require an old Java runtime or something like that. It's been long enough that I no longer remember how I did it, though I'm sure I can scrounge up the instructions somewhere.

I'd just upgrade the apps, but I'm also told that Adobe moved to a subscription based license, and I'd be paying them monthly for products I use intensely for a while, then not at all for a few months, then intensely again... etc. I do not want to learn a replacement for Illustrator. I'm pretty good at it. To attain this state in another app would take years.

Also, I don't know how Microsoft handles the new OS. I use Excel (version 14.7 from an original 2011 install), and it's very important to me. Nothing else will do. (Apple's "Numbers" is nice, but not adequate)

If I could be assured that all those can be made to work flawlessly in Sierra, I'd upgrade tomorrow.

Shooshie

You need to install the JRE 6 from Apple since CS6 is 32bit — just as you had to for Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan. JRE 8 from Oracle is 64bit only. See page 1 of this thread. 0ffice 2008 and 2011 run well in Sierra but only 2011 will still install. If already installed, this is not an issue.

I'm still running Acrobat Pro X, Photoshop 5.1 and Elements 6 (all predate CS6) in Sierra along with Office 2008. I don't like 2011 but most of my customers are running it.

Turn Time Machine off before installing Sierra. That way, if you don't like it, you can do a full system restore through TM. When you like Sierra, turn it back on.

Sierra will no longer be available through the App Store in a few weeks. If you don't upgrade now, it will still be possible later but a lot more difficult.

[mikehalloran]

A large contributor to the spinning beach ball is App Nap. Unless you are on a portable and battery life is an issue, App Nap serves no purpose. DP is one of many apps affected by this. Copy the following and paste into Terminal:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

Here's a good article on this:
http://osxdaily.com/2014/05/13/disable- ... -mac-os-x/

[bayswater]

I noticed the App Nap check box in Get Info does not exist for many applications, including Logic. Either Logic doesn't nap, or it does and you can't turn it off. But, If you launch Logic and look at Activity Monitor, it shows App Nap is not on. So it looks like Apple doesn't let App Nap interfere with most of it's own Apps (it does apply to the Finder and Mail, but not Aperture, Photos, Maps, Safari, Numbers, etc,)

In fact, very few of the applicationsI looked at, Apple or third party, have an option to turn App Nap on and off in Get Info; DSP-Q and DP are two of them I wonder why the developers don't just turn that off?

[mikehalloran]

I noticed the App Nap check box in Get Info does not exist for many applications, including Logic. Either Logic doesn't nap, or it does and you can't turn it off. But, If you launch Logic and look at Activity Monitor, it shows App Nap is not on. So it looks like Apple doesn't let App Nap interfere with most of it's own Apps (it does apply to the Finder and Mail, but not Aperture, Photos, Maps, Safari, Numbers, etc,)

In fact, very few of the applicationsI looked at, Apple or third party, have an option to turn App Nap on and off in Get Info; DSP-Q and DP are two of them I wonder why the developers don't just turn that off?

Don't know. Office 2008 and 2011 were around before App Nap so no surprises that it gets screwed up when it's on.

Per that article, individual apps will not show that it's disabled when you run the Terminal command but they are and the article shows you how to check.

Why Apple doesn't make it so that App Nap is the default only for portables is beyond me. That is ridiculous.

[bayswater]

Per that article, individual apps will not show that it's disabled when you run the Terminal command but they are and the article shows you how to check.
.

Yes, that's how I checked. Apple sets App Nap on, and then doesn't use it for most of its own apps. Odd.