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Forum: VirtualDJ Technical Support

Topic: Mac M2 and Stems - Page: 1
djsh69PRO InfinityMember since 2018
Hello,

I have a question about stems and the M1/M2 processors.
Does Virtual DJ use the GPU or the Neural Engine for stems?
With the M2 MacBook Pro you can scale up the GPU cores, but Neural Engine stays at 16 Cores.
 

Posted Tue 17 Jan 23 @ 4:26 pm
 

Posted Tue 17 Jan 23 @ 4:38 pm
djsh69PRO InfinityMember since 2018
This would mean that a 4000€ MacBook Pro would not be much faster calculating stems than my 1600€ MacBook Air, as both have 16Core Neural engine. Of course there is some difference to be expected due to memory band width …
 

Posted Tue 17 Jan 23 @ 7:00 pm
Yes I've been looking in to this and there's not much in it at all. M1 base spec does stems in around 15s which is pretty good.

M2 Max when it comes out on the new macbooks May be faster still.
 

Posted Tue 17 Jan 23 @ 7:53 pm
It's out Keith available 24th January onwards. 😳

OMG! It's a bit pricey though, unless you go for the Mac Mini! 😳

Click here for the M2 Macs
 

Posted Tue 17 Jan 23 @ 11:54 pm
DJLes.co.uk you made me peek at the pre-order price. (would arrive Feb 3rd)

Seems this should work well for 2.0 stems:

The Apple M2 Max with 12‑core CPU,
38‑core GPU,
16‑core Neural Engine
96GB unified memory
4TB SSD storage <<< choose the bit larger SSD for Track storage.
16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display² << the 96GB unified memory only available on the 16-inch display

Drum Roll.................... and the Price is:


want to see the real life benchmarks first... as they are saying 22+ hours of battery life, etc,
and could be persuaded to switch to a Mac.

Anyone getting one of these beasts.. please share your VDJ 2.0 stems compute times.
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 6:18 am
Yeah just noticed the announcement. As usual for Apple there's a price hike in there but pretty sure I can get 10% off as my son is currently at Uni :)

Probably go for the £2699 M2 Pro one with the 1Tb storage. I still really can't stand MacOS and it will be a bit more difficult without being able to move the VDJ home folder to a separate partition (easier for syncing from my master machine) but I guess I'll just have to live with it. The Mac will only really be used for VDJ and ShowXpress so should be fine.

I'm really disillusioned with Windows laptops and the whole way they work, especially the mess with having on-chip and dedicated GPU in the same machine. There's no denying the unified architecture of the arm Macs is so much better, it's just difficult to embrace change after using Windows since the early 90s.

I use the 16" Macbook Pro (Intel) as my main machine but I think I've booted it in to the Mac side about twice.

 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 8:50 am
IIDEEJAYII wrote :
Anyone getting one of these beasts..

Jeez... You can almost get a new Tesla for that, after the price-drop
IIDEEJAYII wrote :
please share your VDJ 2.0 stems compute times.

... and maybe compare it to this list:
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 9:13 am
I had a RTX3080 laptop for a week or so and it was nowhere near 30x. I would have said nearer 15x as it took around 15 to 20 seconds for a 3 minute track.
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 9:14 am
djsh69 wrote :
This would mean that a 4000€ MacBook Pro would not be much faster calculating stems than my 1600€ MacBook Air, as both have 16Core Neural engine. Of course there is some difference to be expected due to memory band width …


Maybe check the list above
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 9:14 am
kradcliffe wrote :
I had a RTX3080 laptop for a week or so and it was nowhere near 30x. I would have said nearer 15x.

Well, I believe it's what the devs measured on their machines before the Stems 2.0 release
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 9:16 am
On board VRAM also matters. It's not just the GPU itself.
I am getting speeds around 18x with a RTX 3060 laptop, and around 20x with a M1 Pro.
So, I'm getting slightly more speed than the average "15x" provided for RTX 3060 above.
It's also hard to believe that a RTX 3080 on a system is giving times at 15x (same as "official" RTX 3060 times). Unless the testing was done on a business laptop where everything is heavily streamlined for efficiency and power saving e.t.c. and therefore despite having a RTX 3080 it's so badly limited that effectively becomes RTX 3060 or worse.. :P

For better or worse, if you want to get the most performance out of a laptop*, you really have only one option: Go for a "gaming" laptop.

*->That's not a MAC :P
I don't want/need to enter the MAC/PC debate.
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 9:29 am
klausmogensen wrote :
IIDEEJAYII wrote :
Anyone getting one of these beasts..

Jeez... You can almost get a new Tesla for that, after the price-drop


made me laugh.. and then think .. what actually is the AI computational power of a Tesla, (needed for all the graphic processing of camera data, for self driving).. It definitely has a large enough battery..

Maybe you are on to something

smiles
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 11:40 am
That's it ordered. Pick up 10am on Tuesday. Got a discount of £220 with my son's Unidays sign in so not too bad I guess.

It's all the fault of Les as he started talking about Macbooks a couple of months ago :)

 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 3:17 pm
djsh69PRO InfinityMember since 2018
i have a question about stems computing times.
There are some numbers from the devs and some from people here in forums.
How are these measured?
When a song is 3 mins (180 seconds) long and it’s 10x so it means it takes 18 seconds?
Are these values really comparable?
Doesn‘t this values also depend on filetype (like mp3, or mp4) or maybe even on the kind of the song?
Maybe we can use some kind of free available songs that everybody could download and check on his machine?
Or is there already such kind of list?
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 7:02 pm
AdionPRO InfinityCTOMember since 2006
This number is only for the stems itself. There is indeed some additional time needed for decoding the song, loading it from the hard drive, calculating waveforms etc..., but since this only takes a few seconds at most on almost any computer these days it doesn't really matter for the total time.
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 7:06 pm
kradcliffe wrote :
That's it ordered. Pick up 10am on Tuesday. Got a discount of £220 with my son's Unidays sign in so not too bad I guess.
😳 Huh? I'm jealous. 😁

kradcliffe wrote :

It's all the fault of Les as he started talking about Macbooks a couple of months ago :)
Sorry, not sorry. 😁

I have to say in my defence I was a PC guy from way back in the 80s. I only switched to Mac in 2010, but, I boot camped it and DJed from W7 until Windows screwed up a wedding 1st dance. That's when I switched to the Mac for DJing & never looked back. I also have a 2017 Touchbar Mac boot camped with W10, but, used the Mac version for DJing. Now I use the 14" M1 Mac for DJing.

Some tests I did a while ago;

Stems 2.0 generation on M1 MacBook Pro 16gb

Venbee, Goddard - Messy In Heaven (Official Video).mp4
Music video, length 3:00 minutes, stems completed = 15 seconds

Schak feat. Kim English - Moving All Around (Jumpin) [Extended Mix].mp3
mp3 length 7:08 minutes, stems completed = 25 seconds

Joel Corry, MNEK - Head & Heart (Extended Mix).m4a
Promo Only m4a length 4:05 minutes, stems completed = 15 seconds

My Systems Specs;
Main System - MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2022), Apple Silicon M1 Pro, 16gb, 500 gb SSD, macOS Ventura 13.1, External WD Passport Ultra 2Tb HD formatted exFat containing Music & Video databases. VirtualDJ v2023-m b7403.
 

Posted Wed 18 Jan 23 @ 8:54 pm
[quote=kradcliffe]That's it ordered. Pick up 10am on Tuesday. Got a discount of £220 with my son's Unidays sign in so not too bad I guess.

It's all the fault of Les as he started talking about Macbooks a couple of months ago :)




Welcome to the dark side! Hope you enjoy the new Mac as much as most of us do
 

Posted Thu 19 Jan 23 @ 2:20 am
Is anyone running on macOS Ventura an an M2 MBP or macBook Air? I'm thinking about upgrading, but want to make sure everything runs. Jimbo in Dallas TX
 

Posted Thu 19 Jan 23 @ 8:44 pm
djsh69PRO InfinityMember since 2018
I‘m running VDJ on a MacBook Air M2 (16GB RAM/512 GB SSD) with Ventura, so it is working …
but it is only my preparation machine, so I can‘t tell you if it is reliable a whole night …

My stem conversions show only 9-10 x speed, but it is measured with a stop watch.
in my test there seems to be no big difference between FullHD MP4 and pure audio MP3 files.


 

Posted Fri 20 Jan 23 @ 4:53 pm
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