For example, I only recently moved my main production machine to Mac OS Mojave and in order to keep compatibility. Installing Pro ToolsĪs I have mentioned already, Avid has released Pro Tools 2019.12, which provides support ‘with restrictions’ for Mac OS 10.5 ‘Catalina’ but without support for the 2019 Mac Pro, for which support is still listed as ‘coming soon’. I’ve also bought a couple of PCIe sleds for a 1TB NVME and a 2TB SSD, so I have a total of 7TB of storage internally. Since taking delivery of the Mac Pro, the memory has been upgraded via OWC/Mac Sales (much cheaper than Apple) with an extra 128GB for a total of 160GB (and I still have 4 RAM slots free.) You could definitely have this machine in your control room and still track vocals with a condenser microphone. If you put your ear right up against it you can hear the fan very slightly - from 1-2 metres away it is dead silent. The machine is effectively silent in a recording studio environment. The new chassis is a work of art and design. Unboxing was an excellent experience - the box is super heavy-duty, the two sections are held together with velcro fabric, definitely a box to hold onto if you have space, should you ever need to transport it anywhere. Yes, it was expensive- around £8,900 all up. The order went in to with Apple with a date of delivery of around early January, but bless them they managed to get it to me a whole lot earlier than that, just 9 days after it was ordered and that included it getting lost in the delivery system once. I work in Logic and Pro Tools and didn’t want to give up working in Logic unless I absolutely had to, so the day the Mac Pro was released I looked at the different specs and plunked down the cash for a 3.2GHz 16 Core machine with a 4TB SSD and base video and RAM. When the new Mac Pro 2019 was announced I thought long and hard about going for a PC workstation. But I found myself asking the question “Why can they not just make a proper tower computer for all the stuff to go in?” A New Toy It did mean that I could position the Mac mini away from the mix position, which was great. It too is a great machine for the money but I was still in a mess of Apple dongles with an expansion chassis. The iMac lasted for me until 2018 when I bought a Mac mini. I’d argue that is its natural environment, or at least, out of the way and away from my ears. A tower can be placed in the machine room. I also found that the iMac’s fans would spin up at inopportune times, not often but when they did it was annoying and I always had a nagging sense that a tower is just the proper machine for a studio, not an “all in one” like the iMac. I didn’t hate it and yes it all worked, but it felt clunky and messy compared to a nice neat tower with ‘all the stuff inside it’. The iMac also saw me end up with a mess of dongles and using an expansion chassis for the HDX card. Of course, you could put the iMac in a machine room but then you are paying for a large screen you cannot use. The iMac is a fine machine in itself but in a professional recording studio, I tend to prefer to have anything, that has a fan in it, as far away from my ears as possible. I bought a 2017 iMac 5k 27” as a bit of a test. When my 2010 Mac Pro died a few years ago I considered buying another identical machine on the used market but wanted to get something more modern with Thunderbolt. Not without a few bumps in the road but, on the whole, a positive experience. I’ve had a happy marriage with Apple and Pro Tools for many years. Then a G5, then a couple of Mac Pro’s- running TDM/HD/HDX systems for the most part as well as native systems. It is just a lot of money for a computer for me, a one-man-band producer/engineer/audio consultant. There isn’t a machine that works for me as much as a Mac tower, and as we all know Apple hasn’t made a proper tower since 2012. I bought the new Mac Pro somewhat under duress. Yes, I actually bought one, which was a surprise to me as much as anyone (although not to my long-suffering and extremely wonderful wife). Mac OS Catalina Support is here for Pro Tools with the exception of the new Mac Pro, which is a pity because that is the machine I see sitting before me. In this article, he shares his experiences setting up a 2019 Mac Pro with Logic Pro X and Pro Tools 2019.12 running on macOS Catalina with an Avid Pro Tools HDX1 system. He has chosen to go for a new 2019 Mac Pro even though it isn’t approved yet for Pro Tools. Community member James Richmond is a freelance producer/engineer/audio consultant working from his studio in Oxfordshire, UK.
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