Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
OT: Have you migrated from an Intel Mac to an M1 Mac? Pls let me know how it went.
There are lots of generic articles and videos out there about this, but I am more interested in the experience of the ABF members, because I'm assuming you had various music apps to take care of when you migrated.
How did you do it? Clean install? A combo of app install + content transfer? Migration Assistant? And how did it go? Do you have any tips on what to watch out for with music apps? Any hiccups with native vs Rosetta operation? What about old projects? Etc.
My use case will be 2012 Mac Mini Catalina to M1 Mac Mini, but I'm interested in any Intel Mac to M1 Mac experience. Long story, quick tip, I'd like them all. 
Thank you in advance!
Comments
I just migrated from an external hard drive Time Machine backup of my previous computer when I got my M1. Expect a lot of your older software to be unusable unless the developer/company is still around and making regular updates.
You’ll also probably be surprised to find at some point that your older system software and a large number of your files have been moved unceremoniously to a new location (I’m sorry I don’t have the name at my fingertips at this moment). So you’ll have to re-find them and make new shortcuts for yourself.
Would I do it again? Absolutely. The benefits outweigh the problems by quite a bit. My new iMac beats the heck out of the old one.
When I change computers, it's always a clean install. No migration, no mess. I backup and transfer documents, files only, never settings.
I migrated with a time machine backup on a hard drive. No problems, but I made sure to clean up the old computer really good before I did the migration. I still have the impression that I have a little bit of bloating going on, but nothing serious.
Remember that you have to activate everything again AND you might need the old computer to deactivate stuff. So if you transfer iLok things etc. better make sure to deactivate everything first!
Edit: Also I did almost the same thing as you, 2012 MBP with Catalina to M1 Mac Mini
I set up my MacBook Pro as a fresh clean install.
I have 2TB iCloud account which made life easy as I just put all my Logic projects, samples etc into iCloud Drive from my old MacBook Pro.
I then just installed only the apps and plugins I needed as I went along.
I much prefer this to transferring an account which brings too much crap with it.
The worst thing about getting a new mac is dealing with audio plugins and the fact they all use different apps, installers and copy protection schemes.
They really don’t make it fun. Dealing with all the separate authorising schemes is a total pain in the arse. I haven’t bothered with some plugins at all. I have mainly only installed native UB plugins. The only exception so far has been T-Racks and AmpliTube. All the sample base IK stuff is native which is a bonus. Arturia and CHerry are all native now so I’m more than covered for most eventualities.
The new MBP is amazing. So much quicker at everything. No waiting to wake. No fan noise. No hot lap. No needing power supplies after an hour.
going from the touchbar Intel MacBook Pro to the M1 Pro is a revelation. I’ve replaced easily the worst mac I’ve ever owned with probably the best one.
My work 2015 iMac 27” is still hanging on in there. It’s a pretty good machine but hamstrung by the Fusion drive. I reckon I’ll get another year out of it before upgrading that machine.
I’m pretty certain when I upgrade that mac it will be with a fresh install again. It’s quite nice starting from scratch with just the stuff you actually need.
Most of the Intel to M1 switch went well. Rosetta does a good job running older software and plugins.
I would really try to start from scratch.
Many sw developers are currently in the process of making native M1 binaries - some have done it already, others might not manage to do it by the end of 2022.
Non-native apps usually run well too but what's the point in purchasing an M1 without getting the best performance out of it? 😉
Old projects can be a challenge if you don't want to take over all the plugins you have ever used in your projects with each new migration. While DAWs will usually load older projects fine, even just plugin version updates might break compatibility here and there.
One option could be to create lots of separate track stems on your old machine.
It's a lot of work (although, depending on your DAW, some of it could be automated) and will defeat total recall but it will completely free you from plugins and DAW without losing your music and give you a lot of new freedom without locking you into the old workflows again.
Another maybe unrelated note:
Expect some older audio/MIDI hardware to be incompatible for the lack of dedicated drivers.
Also, if you rely on running a virtual version of Windows on your Mac, expect that not to happen soon - until Microsoft and e.g. VMware agree upon an acceptable licensing option.
@NeuM @auxmux @FloRi89 @rs2000 @klownshed - thank you all for these very good points. Positions are neatly split down the middle so far. 🙂
I went from a 2019 MBP to a new M1 Pro MBP and overall the transition was seamless. When I first got it I restored from a Time Machine backup from the 2019 MBP just to make sure everything worked fine in Native mode. I don’t use a lot of 3rd party plug ins and all the ones I do use are from developers who release timely updates. So I wasn’t expecting any issues, it was just a quick double check.
Once I knew everything was working fine, I wiped the HD and did a fresh install of everything. Maybe a bit overkill, but I also test a lot of software for various music companies and not having old beta versions kicking around by mistake is nice. Plus I tend to get back a decent bit of HD space doing this.
The new laptop is still going strong, this thing is a beast, even with the base model I got. I absolutely don’t think the Max is worth it over the Pro version for 99% of musicians btw. Maybe if you do a lot of video editing too, but the Pro is no slouch there by any means.
I'm about to install a new MacBook pro (arrives tomorrow) and I will install from scratch. My files are all in the cloud, so I don't anticipate any problems there.
I would never restore from a backup from another machine because that just seems like its asking for trouble. But in this case it seems like a really bad idea due to the new chip architecture.
I've done migrations using Time Machine and with a new clean install. When I setup my M1 Mac Mini I decided to go with a new install because I figured that I didn't want to copy over all the builds and stuff I had for Intel based machines. I have almost all of my account information and configurations synced to iCloud anyway. The clean install was really smooth and I ended up with much less wasted space and cleanup than I would have from using the Time Machine/Migration Assistant path.
You could try the clean install and if it becomes too much of a pain to get everything over do a reset on the M1 and try a Migration Assistant move.
Yours is a good reason to do a clean install. For the average (non-developer) user, these things are really no longer that much of a concern. For the sake of simplicity, I'd still recommend the Time Machine backup/Migration Assistant route.
Maybe. The people in my office who upgraded using Time Machine had issues with their computers that those who did clean installs never ran into. Which may be unrelated (and this is a few years ago), but a new install seems less risky.
Unless one does both and then compares the results, it's really just speculation whether one is "better" than the other, right? I've gone the clean install route before and the Time Machine backup route and I vastly prefer the Time Machine backup. If you run a business, you need your computer up and running.
Sure it's completely anecdotal.
A clean install will always be safer, just because computers are complex things and the clean install is going to be better tested. But it's probably a low risk for most people (I'm in a similar position to NeonSilicon).
Clean install. Manually move plist files for apps that are too much of a PITA to set up again from scratch.
Thanks again, everyone. I went for a clean install, and on balance I find it a good decision.
That being said, it is also a good occasion to find out which software manufacturers value their customers and which don't. The former come up with all kinds of things to make your life easier: they make decent hub apps that coordinate and automate your downloads and (re)installs, offer to prepare custom install packages if they see that you have purchased multiple items from them, etc. Arturia and AAS are good examples of this kind of company.
The other kind is the one that spectacularly doesn't care about you or your time once you bought their product(s). Crap download managers, forcing the customer to do lots of tedious manual work or to re-download files even if they only contain samples, etc. Output and especially Native Instruments are examples of companies that are clearly just not that into you.