Still no multi core support for audio processing on iOS?

drez

@wim said:
Humm. Start off by concluding someone is a troll. Then proceed with an epic post feeding said troll? Kinda confused as to the logic here.

Sorry for the OT post. I’ll shut up now.

I’m not feeding the troll. I’m feeding the topic.

wim

If you genuinely care about the topic then you wouldn’t need to go out of your way to state a judgement against the creator of it. But OK. I said I’d shut up. I really will now.

drez

@wim said:
If you genuinely care about the topic then you wouldn’t need to go out of your way to state a judgement against the creator of it. But OK. I said I’d shut up. I really will now.

The creator of it has made more than one post in this thread. The judgement is based on the content of the “thread” and first post, not the “topic”. I gave feedback on the topic of the thread based on research personal experience and judged the creator on the content of his posts. Those are mutually exclusive. Nothing wrong with the topic at all, that’s been a great discussion, IMO. However, the majority of the OP’s remarks based on speculation and trying to wrap the topic into a vendetta against apple...

Shabudua

If I had any self control I would just stop reading this thread. But...it keeps popping up to the top of my feed...and I’m such a sucker for drama. @Michael, any luck finding that “ignore/hide thread” function we talked about a while ago???🙂

Michael

@Shabudua said:
If I had any self control I would just stop reading this thread. But...it keeps popping up to the top of my feed...and I’m such a sucker for drama. @Michael, any luck finding that “ignore/hide thread” function we talked about a while ago???🙂

It had turned into a bit of a mud slinging fest hasn't it! Oh dear. I'll just sink the whole thread. Quite enough of that.

McD

But Mom, we were just about to get into the multi-processing improvements in IOS13.
Oh well... getting a signal above the noise floor is always a concern.

vov

@brambos said:

@vov said:
1.iOS as of now is the most unstable OS I ever used.

Someone never used Windows Vista apparently.

I had my share of blue screens, but my audio wasn’t crashing every few minutes even then.
What your view as a developer on the exact reason for such a lack of utilization of multithreading for audio processing on iOS - processors’ architecture, OS, or lack of knowhow among the devs. Maybe Apple doesn’t provide enough tools for devs to be able to implement it conveniently? Please only don’t start telling me we don’t need it - you’ll never convince me in that.

skrat

@vov Just wondering, did you investigate already wether you iPad is affected by this issue: https://www.cultofmac.com/595330/ipad-pro-bug-music-apps-stutter/ ? I don't own affected iPad Pro so I didn't care, it seems like this could have been already solved by update, but I wasn't able to find exact update that was supposed to fix it. Maybe other owners of the affected iPad here can help.
Also, I see you often mention Moog. Their synths, especially Model 15, are the most resource-hungry apps I know. They tried to target the performance issues in some of the recent updates but honestly, still not much difference to me.
Also, someone already mentioned it but it's good to repeat it: The performance of audio apps is heavily depended on the buffer size you use (which equals to latency) and frequency rate and bit depth. These actually multiplies the demand on resources, which makes a huge difference. With buffer size, for 512 or 1024 samples you should get the most performance while keeping reasonable latency and as 44khz/16bit are more or less standard, there were discussions about this topic, you may try using more, at least for export, but it requires some experimenting and knowing which DAW and plugins use for it to make sense. For regular working mode, it's not recommended to use higher values, it's too resource intensive for iPads.

I suggest you to do some test and find people with the same (or similar) iPad models to compare the performance, e.g. load X instances of Model 15 and load some first presets in each of them, then run e.g. Fugue and load it with each playhead, to have some output and you should spot, where are the limits. You can repeat with different synth, in different hosts etc. At least you'll know, if your case is isolated, how your model compare to others and at least turn your frustration into something valuable for the community

vov

@skrat said:
@vov Just wondering, did you investigate already wether you iPad is affected by this issue: https://www.cultofmac.com/595330/ipad-pro-bug-music-apps-stutter/ ? I don't own affected iPad Pro so I didn't care, it seems like this could have been already solved by update, but I wasn't able to find exact update that was supposed to fix it. Maybe other owners of the affected iPad here can help.

Yes I read this article, but everyone including some of the developers implied that this problem was solved. Now, I wonder if it was solved only in part.

Also, I see you often mention Moog. Their synths, especially Model 15, are the most resource-hungry apps I know. They tried to target the performance issues in some of the recent updates but honestly, still not much difference to me.

I tried many other synths including very old ones.

Also, someone already mentioned it but it's good to repeat it: The performance of audio apps is heavily depended on the buffer size you use (which equals to latency) and frequency rate and bit depth. These actually multiplies the demand on resources, which makes a huge difference. With buffer size, for 512 or 1024 samples you should get the most performance while keeping reasonable latency and as 44khz/16bit are more or less standard, there were discussions about this topic, you may try using more, at least for export, but it requires some experimenting and knowing which DAW and plugins use for it to make sense. For regular working mode, it's not recommended to use higher values, it's too resource intensive for iPads.

I always keep buffer size in mind, as to frequency I’m not so sure. I’ve been told that newer devices work at 48.

I suggest you to do some test and find people with the same (or similar) iPad models to compare the performance, e.g. load X instances of Model 15 and load some first presets in each of them, then run e.g. Fugue and load it with each playhead, to have some output and you should spot, where are the limits. You can repeat with different synth, in different hosts etc. At least you'll know, if your case is isolated, how your model compare to others and at least turn your frustration into something valuable for the community

Would be great to find like-minded people who can do that.

skrat

@vov I can just quickly tell you my test I tried to compare Model 15, which I considered the most hardware-demanding app I own and Poison-202 which always seemed to me like adding virtually no cpu load. The device is iPad 2017 (A9, 2GB RAM), the host I used is AUM, 44khz and 1024 buffer size.
I loaded 3 Fugue machines in the MIDI strip which was the easiest way to provide me 12 MIDI sources (each Fugue machine has 4 playheads), I just opened first 3 presets from Fugue machine.
When I loaded Model 15 with 3 random presets I got first cracklings and CPU spikes over 100%. Then as I closed the AU window, it has calmed down, but still only adding new Model 15 started cracking a lot, when 4th instance started playing, the CPU was always spiking over 100% and it was nearly crackling only.
Then with Poison-202, I was able to play all 12 instances and CPU was stable between 30-35%, of course, no cracklings. Then I stopped, but I think the message is clear: There are huge differences on CPU load among apps and it's good to know, which app is going to consume most of your CPU and which not. For Model 15, you can use one instance in medium-size project and should be still fine, multiple instances are obviously problematic. With many other AUs, you don't need to care that much and usually you don't even reach the limit of your device.
Maybe you can create a new discussion and provide some test case, similar to mine, and ask people to try it out and provide their results to compare. At least we'll find out how cpu hungry are which plugins

vov

@skrat said:
@vov I can just quickly tell you my test I tried to compare Model 15, which I considered the most hardware-demanding app I own and Poison-202 which always seemed to me like adding virtually no cpu load. The device is iPad 2017 (A9, 2GB RAM), the host I used is AUM, 44khz and 1024 buffer size.
I loaded 3 Fugue machines in the MIDI strip which was the easiest way to provide me 12 MIDI sources (each Fugue machine has 4 playheads), I just opened first 3 presets from Fugue machine.
When I loaded Model 15 with 3 random presets I got first cracklings and CPU spikes over 100%. Then as I closed the AU window, it has calmed down, but still only adding new Model 15 started cracking a lot, when 4th instance started playing, the CPU was always spiking over 100% and it was nearly crackling only.
Then with Poison-202, I was able to play all 12 instances and CPU was stable between 30-35%, of course, no cracklings. Then I stopped, but I think the message is clear: There are huge differences on CPU load among apps and it's good to know, which app is going to consume most of your CPU and which not. For Model 15, you can use one instance in medium-size project and should be still fine, multiple instances are obviously problematic. With many other AUs, you don't need to care that much and usually you don't even reach the limit of your device.
Maybe you can create a new discussion and provide some test case, similar to mine, and ask people to try it out and provide their results to compare. At least we'll find out how cpu hungry are which plugins

Thank you I’ll try.

dendy

Opening zombie thread

Recently watched this video ... Guy from Ableton (yes, looks like Ableton is really testing waters on iOS !!!) speaks about possible concepts how audio apps can utilise multiple cores on iOS devices AND also solve CPU trolling issue - and it looks it IS doable !! This has really big potential...

very interesting talk, a bit technical so maybe it's more for developers than for users, but two MAJOR messages from this talk are

• there IS way how to utilise multicore performance at iOS [fact]
• Ableton is at least checking what is possible on iOS (so maaaybe they are cooking something secretly ??) [pure speculation]

klownshed

@dendy said:

very interesting talk, a bit technical so maybe it's more for developers than for users, but two MAJOR messages from this talk are

• there IS way how to utilise multicore performance at iOS [fact]
• Ableton is at least checking what is possible on iOS (so maaaybe they are cooking something secretly ??) [pure speculation]

Cool. Exciting times indeed (deliberately forgetting Everything else that's going on the world for a minute!).