Comment by piva00

9 months ago

Also, macOS's audio stack is unmatched, Windows and Linux are an absolute mess for anything audio-related. It's doable on those OSes but very far from a pleasant experience.

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piva00

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daerogami  9 months ago

My coworker would disagree with you. Slack and Teams never remember the microphone, frequently fails to initialize the device correctly and have to rejoin the meeting. _Never_ have that problem on Windows or Linux.

majewsky  9 months ago

Asking as a Linux user for whom PipeWire works fine (for recording, live-streaming, as well as playback), what does macOS do better?

  • bayindirh  9 months ago

    Latency for the most part. It's almost non-existent and has effectively no visible load on the system. Also, you can plug any advanced interface via USB or Thunderbolt and carry massive amount of audio data just by selecting that device from a list. It's simple, it's transparent, it's fast and it works.

    While I agree that Pipewire works great and pretty transparently for single channel capture and multichannel playback, I don't know what happens when you add a 6 channel audio interface and start recording on all of them at the same time.

    • viraptor  9 months ago

      Then you should give pipewire a serious go with multiple channels. It's way better than MacOS stack which doesn't really do independent multichannel by default. There's an API for it that some paid apps use that lets you do it. Meanwhile pipewire just lets you connect whatever wherever. I managed with pipewire to get lower latency on Bluetooth headphones than MacOS allows at all.

      What happens with 6 channels? You just connect them where you want and it works.

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    • seec  9 months ago

      That's a bullshit myth. Actually, CoreAudio is implemented in such a way that the minimum latency is 2 samples when you can go down to 1 with some drivers on Windows.

      Macs are "good" for audio, because audio people tend to do nonsense with their softwares (a lot of pirated stuff that they don't even know how to install properly) and macOS makes it harder to put the system in a problematic state.

      But it doesn't have that many advantages in comparison to a well-managed system apart from some specific audio utilities (that can be quite useful/good, that much I can agree with).

      In other words, Macs are good for noobs, and the stereotype of Apple users being pretty bad with computers is usually not completely wrong (the average Windows user isn't better really but they are not so narcissistic and arrogant about their choice of computers).

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