M1 MacBook Pro

[atma]

Hey Reason forum. I’m new here so here’s a (not so) quick intro. I’m a longtime hobbyist reason user (I believe ver. 3 was my first purchased version), although the past few years I haven’t fired it up much. I’ve been looking to get back into it, and after a few fun sessions running ver 8 on my late 2009 17” MacBook Pro, it decided it lo longer wanted to power on. At all. End of an era, and it went out with a whimper.

This happened like a month ago, and I was in no hurry to replace it with an Intel powered Mac knowing the Apple Silicon announcement was just weeks away. I had to decide between short term availability of apps and long term sustainability. Apple said they support the Intel macs for “years to come” and in my head I heard “this unit will be frozen in time in 4-5 years” so I opted for the M1 13” MacBook Pro.

I know propellerheads say M1 processors are not supported for reason but I was curious to see how it would run through Rosetta2. It shipped with Big Sur already installed and I know reason 8 isn’t supported so I upgraded to 11 Suite.

The laptop arrived yesterday. I didn’t do any migrating or load a time machine backup because I want a clean install. I haven’t moved any old files over because I’m waiting for an external case for my old hard drive to be able to access all my old stuff, so I can’t do any direct comparisons. I don’t know how valuable it’d be anyway comparing to such an old box.

As mentioned in another thread here, upon trying to install reason, You’re asked to install Rosetta first. That’s the last you ever see of it, it’s invisible after that. Reason installed perfectly from that point, as did all of the extra Suite devices.

All I’ve done to this point is fired up the software and run each of the included demo songs. They both play perfectly. I have no idea how demanding they are in comparison to a real world project.

Anyway, point of all this is I’ll follow up with whatever I find as I find it. If anyone has any questions I can try to answer to the best of my ability. Looking forward to refamiliarizing myself with Reason and getting my hands on all of the fun new features and devices.

[vertex808]

I am also running Reason 11 on a M1 MacBook Pro and I also read it was not supported yet but it works great for me as well such a nice machine for music production. I had problems with my old windows laptop with ASIO drivers and everything so its so nice to just turn on a computer and it works with Reason.

Shot a quick video showing that it works:

[stekme]

Can you please write model of you MacBook Pro? 8/16gb ram?
Can you load one of the demo song with highest DSP level and make print screen? Plus CPU level from MacOs system utilities?
This can help to us understand what this model of MBP M1 - can do by DSP level and CPU with concrete demo song, that everybody have preisntalled.
This can be really helpful test comparison

[EdGrip]

I would think that none of the demo songs are specifically designed to stress CPU, and I should think all of them would play on any modern computer.
Really, you need the CPU stress test song file - although, I seem to remember that there were plenty of computers that could play it through to the end, and that was a couple of years ago. So even that might not be enough! But we could at least see how high the meter is by the end.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7501402

[miscend]

Interesting thread. The new Mac mini looks juicy for the price.