Comment by golergka
4 months ago
You can, theoretically. In practice, a lot of tools like Logic and specific VSTs are macos-only, and CoreAudio actually "just works" out of the box without having to manually install and setup all kinds of alternative low-latency drivers.
> CoreAudio actually "just works" out of the box
If Apple is not messing up their USB subsystem like they did with Ventura, where people basically had to wait a whole major release until they got stable performance again with Sonoma.
Or if they don’t break iLok copy protection, like they just did with 14.4
And for professional hardware, you don’t have to install “all kinds of alternative drivers”. You just install the one official driver from the hardware vendor and that’s it.
Having used all three major OS’s for music at different times, MacOS is still my go-to. There just isn’t the futzing I had to do on windows. Linux was actually a contender for me back in the day - I feel like MIDI routing on Linux is just easier[1] although older OSX touting was also very good imo. I kept my G4 tower going for a looooong time because I had just the right setup of tools and hacks to do everything I needed to where windows wouldn’t cut it and no one wrote the drivers I used for Linux.
These days I don’t tinker like I used to and mostly just need simple MIDI routing and something that can copy renders from my mixer, so anything will work. I still prefer the ease of MacOS though I can do everything I need to on any OS
[1] the main drawback for Linux was really a lack of good docs for things like PD, and not having access to Live. If I’d had Reaper back then it might have been my daily driver.
Live works fine through Wine, nowadays. If I'm not mistaken, the Ableton installer works fine too - you just download the Windows copy and it installs it like-native. Very odd stuff, but it works fine from what I remember (I use Bitwig now).
CoreAudio was definitely the better choice when Linux only had JACK, ALSA and PulseAudio, but now that PipeWire exists it's very close to a CoreAudio-esque experience. You can record out of other apps, route processed audio into a voice chat, or manage the world's largest DAC without issue.
I can understand having personal preferences of course. I have been using macOS for audio production for more than 20 years.
I personally just feel that the "futzing" you mention is worse on macOS nowadays than it is on Windows.
And while Windows certainly has its share of issues as well, it's usually transparent and open enough so I can actually fix them. Whereas on macOS, the only course of action is often to just hope and pray Apple will fix what they broke in a future update.