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RAM and iOS Music Production
I'm curious what hard info there is out there about RAM consumption with iOS music production in 2024.
With the latest Pro iPads coming out, and it costing an additional $600 USD to get 16GB RAM, I tried digging into how useful this is to an audio creator, and most of what I've seen is speculation.
Is there any way currently with any of the iOS daws to tell if you are being ram limited or CPU limited? What is the current state of things from the development side (app access to ram etc)?
Thanks for indulging my questions!
Comments
FWIW I totally understand one use case is loading a LOT of large audio files or apps with large soundfonts, that'll obviously eat into RAM if the app can't stream the file.
I also understand that maybe running apps in the background could have an impact. If you want to switch between a drawing app and a daw or something
iOS doesn't supply adequate ways of measuring RAM usage to get any hard data. Experimentation is the only way.
Yea that was my assumption... I'm hoping maybe some devs have more info as they have more tools available to them to monitor ram.
This is an interesting if not directly useful stackoverflow. Talking about how apps can crash the device before hitting max ram consumption (maybe due to system ram needs?) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5887248/
Tbh all you need is a basic m1 air for what we do here (iOS music production)…and that’ll serve you well for years to come still.
I definitely am maxing out my Air 4th gen which is only slightly weaker than the M1 Air by CPU but has half the RAM. It really depends on what you are using. My goal in this is to try reveal what objective info folks might have about this to make it easier for everyone to make the best purchasing decisions in general
That being said, yea the M1 Air does a lot!
So hard to tell what is ram related and what is simply buggy or just not tested/developed well on this platform, especially when hosts and plugins are involved. For the most part I find the better the device I get the smoother things are. 16 gigs of ram to me feels like one could just end up running many instances of a given plugin and reveal issues that even the dev never tested.
Been loving my M1 pro and have hit a performance wall in Bm3 (who's cpu meter is now busted and will likely never be multicore, sigh) where loading more instances of a given synth leads to problems with patch recall when loading sessions. I don't know, Cubasis seems like the best for harnessing extra power, or stability in general now (surprise surprise) it just lacks things I "need". But yah I would think for pure anecdotal test results Cubasis may be the best measure to vibe cpu vs ram issues. Not sure if Logic supports multicore.
The Ax series while extremely powerful, are not in the same league as the silicon M series.
Objectively speaking the previous generation (while on benchmarks seems to be close to the M) is not even close to the silicon M because of the unified architecture - the cpu, ram and gpu run in a way unique to Apple .
The silicon M, with as little as 6Gb of ram , out powers and outperforms any level of intel or amd. Pound for pound it’s not really Apple to apples lol it’s apples and oranges .
I don’t mean to put down previous generations or anything or be subjective about it but since you are looking for info I thought I’d add that. 8GB of ram on the m1 is like 32GB of ram on a standard intel/and processor /non silicon M traditional motherboard
And also I’m trying to save some of us money, nothing fully utilizes the power of the M1 chip yet, and it’s been 4 years …having an m2 might be nice, but it’s going to be like having a 1000hp Bugatti in bumper to bumper traffic: sure you got the juice, but you have no road to push it on. There is no software that utilizes the full power and nothing is close to pushing the limits yet of the m1
So I am only recommending what I would find as useful and helpful frugal info/tips . IMHO it’ll be another 2-3 years before we see the m1 even slow down
An m4 with 16 gb of ram is like I said^ having the fastest car in the world but there are only unpaved dirt roads or again, bumper to bumper traffic .
There’s a reason Logic 2 NEEDS silicon - unified architecture makes the iPad Air more powerful than almost any windows desktop (within reasonable numbers , meaning I’m not comparing it with a quadruple Xeon mainframe , I’m comparing it to desktops/laptops/tablets
Anyway I hope something is useful there^ …
Logic does do Multicore. As far as stability goes I think it comes down to how many tracks you’re running. I’ve been attempting to mix about 30 tracks of audio in Cubasis to see how well it would work. It’s good when you just mix and use a few plugin instances and don’t try and do too much editing of the audio tracks themselves. I have run into a few weird buggy things when splitting up audio tracks - graphically and audio wise. The solo/mute operation is also something that drives me a little nuts. It just doesn’t work how one would expect a proper mixing desk/DAW to work.
Logic also has it’s problems. I have found (as have others) that you can run into problems when closing and opening projects that have particular combinations of 3rd party AUv3 plugins installed on tracks. When attempting to mix 30 odd channels of audio tracks I have also discovered that there is definitely a limit as to how many instances of a particular plugin will run properly until you get buggy things happening. e.g. When running a large number of instances of FF pro Q3 I have encountered moments when the plugin will blank back to it’s default condition on all the instances at once. There is a memory limit with AUv3s imposed by the operating system (ie Apple) which I remember is somewhere around 300MB. I think the way it works this memory allocation includes all instances of one pljugin. So I have taken the route of using many different plugins for EQ and processing purposes instead of the same one on each track. Seems to work better this way.
One of the bonuses of Logic is it’s ability to choose the audio interface you are using which enables me to still use iPad speakers when using an external monitor and if Logic is still open in the background then every app that is open (including web browsers) will be using the same audio selection. I don’t know why this can’t be an operating system choice - it’s obviously written into the code.
I got some kind of chain reaction in AUM recently where several apps and their instances crashed at once after a hefty DSP spike, despite being around the 50% mark while it was playing before. I'm using a 9th gen with 3gb ram and guess that it could be related to ram.
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/DMfan🇸🇪
An easy amateur way needing no fancy stuff is to use a CPU-heavy AUv3, Korg Model D for example. Then add and play recorded tracks live, no freezing or bouncing, on top of each other in your DAW. Keep adding. You will eventually get pops, drop-outs, strange audio behavior and finally your DAW will crash. Then you have maxed your RAM out, and you will know it.
😎
/DMfan🇸🇪
Bingo, especially if the DAWs don't support multi-threading...
Currently I max out at ~20 instances of Moog Model D on my M1 iPadPro in LogicPro for iPad.
Moog Mariana crapped out at ~15 with Moog Model 15 in the middle with ~13 instances.
(All instances used different patched and I tried to max out the 4 note poly of each instance).
Hopefully all DAWs will get multi-core support at some point so we can really push our iDevices to the max
I always freeze any tracks from anything I know is intensive like Moog or DecentSampler (which often just quits saying it doesn't have memory). I can easily occupy 60 tracks with groups etc... so also wish that DSP wasn't the only metric we can judge by as often these things just fail silently.
Thanks for these replies everyone. Its a good reminder that you can often kinda tell when things are failing for RAM vs processing reasons. As someone who seems to be only maxing out CPU not RAM, I didn't quite realize this. I'm mostly using synthesis and FX, few samples and never any bounce-down tracks, so that makes sense.
All-in-all, these conversations have added confidence that I don't need 16gb with my workflow
Also useful to remember that you can test if you think you are close to one of the limits.
You can load more long samples if your DAW to test if its ram. Load more synthesis-y plugins to test if its CPU. Load more instances of the same ram-heavy (sample-based) plugin to see if you are hitting specifically a AUv3-level ram limit.
Great reference, may I know the ram size of your M1 iPad Pro?
8GB (It was the CPU that hit the roof not RAM).
Got it. If the subject app is not a synth engine but a sample based one, would that’s flip the limitation from CPU to ram?
Depends on if the plug-in can stream from disk or not and how well optimized it is.
The Moog apps are known 'CPU Hogs' and honestly not that special and one seldom needs more than a few instances.
It also depends which iPad one compares to and what the practical need is?
Just staring at hardware statistics is pretty pointless...
It's not quite that simple. Each plugin has a limited amount of ram that all instances of that plugin combined can access. It's one of those oddities of the AUv3 spec. So, you could tax total ram by having a lot of instances of a lot of different plugins, but you'll run into the limitations of AUv3 allowed ram before you tap out on total ram in most cases.
Plugins such as Koala that keep all samples in memory can crap out with large sample sets regardless of the amount of ram the machine has.
I'm not sure if the AUv3 instances memory cap is higher with higher RAM devices. It could be, but I don't think so. I've only read that it's a hard number, not a percentage, but it's been a long time since I looked into it and things may have changed.
It is my understanding that the fixed (across all devices) memory allocation of years past was replaced a few years ago by a more dynamic and unspecified limit that remains mysterious to developers. On devices with more RAM , more instances of a particular AU can load than on devices with less RAM. Apple hasn’t shared information about how the limits are determined. So, hosts and AU don’t have an elegant way of avoiding crashes due to RAM allocation.