Audio Unit - VST compatibility

[Arceo]

Hi ya all!
I’m considering the big leap to switch to the Widows world. I’m a DP long time user (Since 1990, when it was call simply Performer) and I need to upgrade my setup. I mostly do hybrid orchestral stuff and I’ve been working with a Mac Pro and two Windows machines running VEPRO for the past 15 years or so.
Now I think it is time to get back to a single machine solution and if I had to stay in the Apple world, I would need to get a Mac Studio Ultra (in order to get all the ram and CPU power my projects need). But with a Mac Studio I should also change my audio card (RME 800 Firewire, which is perfect as it is for my needs), and also buy expensive thunderbolt HD enclosures for my SSDs.
That’s why I’m considering the switch.
My main concern is about compatibility. I NEED to be able to open my previous projects. And since I’ve been using Audio Unit plugin for all of them I wonder if I’ll be able to open those project on DP running on a windows machine. Will DP take care to “translate” AU plugin settings to the correspondent VTS plugin settings? Or I’ll end up with the usual message when DP cannot find the plugins used in the project? How did you guys manage the Mac/PC transition?
Thanks to everybody who made the switch and wants to chime in.

Cheers
Arceo

[HCMarkus]

I went with the M1 Mac Studio Ultra and have loved it.

Wondering if you might be able to use your RME with an adaptor, and whether your SSDs are SATA or NVMe. SATA drives work nicely in very inexpensive USB3 cases.

[mikehalloran]

buy expensive thunderbolt HD enclosures for my SSDs

Not unless you are running a server farm. If SATA III SSDs, inexpensive USB 3.1 Gen 2 docks and enclosures are readily available. Those drives cannot run any faster in a TB3 enclosure — SATA III is your bottleneck. Avoid all "soft raid" solutions when connecting to Apple Silicon. Glyph has some external enclosures with RAID 0 in the hardware accessible through a switch but they're slow by comparison which is weird.

If m.2 NVMe 3 x4 blades, USB 4 4-Lane enclosures cost around $120 or so and have a couple of advantages over similar 2-Lane TB3 enclosures. You do not want to configure sample drives anything other than JBOD in individual enclosures. Thunderbolt 4 allows up to five TB3 devices to connect to a single port through a TB4 hub.

But with a Mac Studio I should also change my audio card (RME 800 Firewire…)

Maybe. If the RME Fireface has Sonoma compatible drivers, a couple of Apple adapters are all you need. If those drivers do not exist, that RME will not work.

When Apple released the 2019 Mac Pro, they declared that VEP was no longer necessary and they were right. The Studio M2 Ultra runs rings around the MP 7.1 at a fraction of the price. I know that mine does. Although no one does it anymore, there is a way to harness 2018 and later Minis to a Studio and other Macs to combine horsepower as long as all have 10GB Ethernet ports. At the 2018 WWDC, I saw stacks of 5, 10 & 20 Minis rendering single AV files for Disney, Pixar and others. The 2019 mac Pro did away with that talk though it's still doable.

The 2023 Mac Pro is the M2 Studio Ultra with more ports and a few PCIe expansion bays plus $400 wheels.

The one thing that no one ever mentions when comparing a high powered Windows machine against a Mac is heat. The energy savings of a Studio over your current rig will nearly pay for that Studio Ultra. Mine runs cool to the touch. A similar Win machine will run Hot! Hot! Hot!

[Arceo]

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts: lot of new thing to consider for me!
Anyway I hope to hear also from people on the Dark Side (aka Windows)

Cheers

[CharlzS]

I just did a quick test and the AU plugs on a Mac session show up as missing when you open on PC even though the VST3 versions of those plugs are available on the PC. Straight up VST may be different, I don't have those active and validated. A quick note to MOTU tech support would clear that up. That is most likely a very common concern.

[bayswater]

I just did a quick test and the AU plugs on a Mac session show up as missing when you open on PC even though the VST3 versions of those plugs are available on the PC. Straight up VST may be different, I don't have those active and validated. A quick note to MOTU tech support would clear that up. That is most likely a very common concern.

The topic of switching between Windows and macOS, and the compatibility of plugins is covered early on in the manual. If you have plugins in VST format, the projects will open properly in both. If you use AU on a Mac, the plugins will not open in Windows. In some cases, saving the AU preset will work when using a VST version of the plugin, but that’s something the plugin maker would put in place, not something that DP does.

[stubbsonic]

A quick note about the RME FF800 and firewire (via adapters). Some people are reporting smooth sailing with recent Mac OS's. I got an M1 MBP and while I'm able to use the FF800 either with adapters or with an older dock that has a FW port; there are issues. For me, I have to immediately quit TotalMix when I boot up (it freezes requiring a force quit), and after a Mac OS update (I'm still in OS 12), I now have to power cycle my FF800 (turning it off when i shut down the mac, and back on after I boot) otherwise the FF800 locks up. And I have to do this after sleep as well. I don't think my experience is common, RME just gave up helping me.

[Arceo]

Again: thank you for all the precious Infos I'm gathering. Lots of new aspect of the migration OSX/Win that I must consider.

[mikehalloran]

You never told us what your current Mac is including drives and RAM. Much easier to make comparisons when we know this.

[Arceo]

You're right Mike. Well I managed to "survive" with sort of a vintage setup. I currently work with an old MacPro 4.1/16Gb of Ram.
The secret of such long life span is VEPRO with 2 slave windows machines. On my Mac I run DP WITHOUT any virtual instrument. This way it only has to deal with audio tracks (44.1/24), Audio Unit effects and VePro PlugIn. The Windows slave machines are maxed out with 64 Gb of ram each, since I mostly do hybrid orchestral stuff.
I freezed the OSX and DP state when I was satisfied with the level of stability of the system (which for me is and ancient OSX 10.6.8/ DP 7.24!!!), and for more than a decade the only thing I had to think of was turn the computers on in the morning and make some music.

Now I feel it's time to leave the past and step back to present

[pencilina]

I tried to switch to windows with a dual boot hackintosh and then gave up. It was a horrible experience with multiple issues. I documented a bit of it on a thread here. Also, I've been using a FF800 with adapters and no issues ever with my m1 MBP (hackintosh was a different story with a driver issue and I upgraded to an FF802) .

[Michael Canavan]

A couple things people hinted at.

AU will not translate to VST on Windows, or on Mac OS, VST2 rarely but sometimes translates to VST3, so that is an issue.

Encosures are not too bad as mentioned, just go with some version of USB3 enclosure for your 2.5" SSDs, but do not settle for less than USB4 for your NVME enclosures, if you use any version of USB3 Mac OS will not be able to read SMART features on that drive. I like using DriveDX to see how much wear and tear my drives have, DriveDX and Apples Disk Utility cannot read the SMART controls for the USB3 and USB 3.2 enclosures for the drives I have in those types. Specifically any WEstern DIEital Sandisk drive with top speeds of 1000MNs. Personally I'm still ticked off about it, $400+ USD for a 4TB drive that tops out at around 650Mbs and will not let me know anything before it dies.

RME have written a firewire driver for Mac OS in Apple Silicon. I haven't tested my FF800 here but to be honest I bought a Babyface because it uses ADAT, and it's a super quick to portable solution for my studio to connect all the hardware to the FF800, slave it to the Babyface and be done with it.

Personally price is the least of the reasons I ever think of Windows boxes, the big one is how many deprecated old plugins I own still run under Windows. Old projects with plugins that didn't make it to Apple Silicon and can't run in Rosetta have to be opened on the old Mac Pro here. The level of slash and burn than APple has done in the past is probably slowing down, but I still think about making an old box for Air, Camel, old NI plugins etc.,