Using Onyx to verify system file structure and run various maintenance tasks on a mac

Sometimes your Mac is running badly and needs some maintenance, now there are a couple of paid utilities I fall back to (mainly TechTool and Diskwarrior, but I will post more about those later) but the first I run is always the free OnyX. Onyx is a GUI or graphical user interface for various terminal utilities. It is from Titanium Software and has different versions for each version of the OS.

I always go to Maintenance and usually run everything except disk positions on desktop. It will quit all open apps and run. And the run will take a while, maybe even an hour depending on hard drive size, then will restart your machine.

I run this when Premiere is being sketchy, lots of crashes, and the system just seems to be running wrong. It isn’t a utility for Premiere, but for your system overall.

9to5Mac is reporting on the possibility of a an upgraded Intel Mac Pro before the move to M1

Change Miller at 9TO5 Mac is reporting that the Xcode 13 Beta has a reference to scalable Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors, which would be a big upgrade from what is in the current Intel MacPro.

It would be nice to see new video cards offered by Apple too since they are supporting more current video cards in the latest versions of Big Sur.

The Mac Pro is supposed to be this upgrade-able machine, so it would be great to see Apple actually make some upgrades available before the completely EOL it. Otherwise all the upgrade ability talk was just bullshit, because they knew that Apple Silicon was coming.

This would be a good boon to editors though to have one last MacPro with the best processor available.

MacRumors reporting several macOS Monterey features unavailable on Intel-Based Macs, doesn’t bode well for continued Intel Support

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors has a report on several features that are only available to M1 macs.

None seem like deal breakers, and the Portrait Mode blurred background could be something with the cameras, which would mean not supported on M1 Mac Mini.

Apple has said they will continue to support Intel Macs for some time, but slowly removing features from Intel doesn’t really seem like full support, and gives doubt to rumors of a final Mac Pro with newer Intel Processor.

Adobe Premiere Pro speeds on an M1 reported officially

Eric Philpott at the Adobe Blog has a report on the latest Pfeiffer Benchmark Reports of Adobe Premiere Pro on Apple Silicon M1, and the results are pretty unbelievable.

From first launch to final exports, everything is faster — on average 77 percent faster than comparable Intel-based systems — and editing is buttery smooth.

Launch 50 percent faster, Open projects 77 percent faster, Save projects 168 percent faster, Gradient wipe effect 90 percent faster, Lens Flare effect 66 percent faster.

Wow, those are seriously impressive results, and would speed up the edit every day. I can’t wait to see what the M2 or even M3 will do, especially if they really goose the graphics cores and allow for more RAM. I am getting more and more excited for an M1 MacPro, even with limited expansion. I mean I have been pretty damn happy with my iMac Pro.

Apple Music’s new streaming Spacial Audio and Lossless

So Apple upgrade it’s Music service recently and added both Lossless and Spacial Audio to it’s Apple Music for the same price. Now I haven’t yet tried the Lossless mainly because I use Beats Pro headphones on my iPhone and I haven’t yet upgraded to Big Sur on my mac, though I am excited to try it on my mac since I have an old Emotiva XDA-1 which should be able to handle at least higher quality audio very well. I also have some wired lightning bolt headphones from 1more that should be able to handle it for my iPhone, that I need to try out.

So I decided to give Spacial Audio a whirl. There are a couple of demos with the Weekend and Marvin Gay and then some playlists. And I have to say the effect is certainly amazing and a hue improvement over the stereo versions. It certainly sounds like the music just opened up completely and does sound so much better. Wow!

I would to hear some pink floyd mixed for this, as it sounds so expansive. I have to say I am impressed.

UPDATE

OK trying out the lossless on my 1more headphones, not the highest quality but 24bit 48hz and it is pretty damn impressive! The Spacial certainly improves the wireless experience, but the Lossless is damned impressive.

FURTHER UPDATE

Turned on Lossless on my Mac, as my Emotica XDA-1 Supports 24bit 192kHz, which is what the lossless goes to. Now the 16bit 44.1kHZ, sound good but the higher quality ones, especially The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Wow.

In Music you can see a symbol in the corner if it is lossless.

And if you click on it it tells the bit rate, and every track is different.

And the higher bit rates do sound better if you have a DAC that can decode them and good headphones.

WOW.

Jarle Leirpoll has a must read article on Premiere Pro’s Render Quality and Bit Depth at Frame.io

Jarle Leirpoll, the author of the book Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro and who runs the awesome site Premiere Pro.net, has written an absolute must read article at Frame.io on Premiere Pro’s Render and Bit Depth settings.

Honestly after all these years of using Premiere Pro I didn’t know exactly how all these settings work and when they are affecting things, and Jarle really goes into depth and he ran extensive tests on everything to prove it.

This really should be essential reading for any Premiere Pro user, and his open letter to Adobe is so true, and I just hope they listen. The whole thing should be simplified, which would quickly solve so many users issues with banding on exports.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

Bloomberg on new Apple Silicon for MacBook Pro, Air, Mac Mini and the MacPro

Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.

The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics. 

Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.

If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.

2 Applications to keep your Mac apps up to date

 

or

So I have been a longtime user of MacUpdate, a web site that keeps a library of more than 32,000 Mac Apps in an easy to find interface, where you can search by Free, paid, on sale, or top rated, or recently updated. So it will update your existing applications as well as help you find new apps.

The problem is the use the MacUpdate Desktop app, it is a $20 subscription for 6 months, and I have had a subscription for a long time, but it is not without it’s issues.

First off I have a long standing re-occuring issue with my login, where the app freezes and stops getting updates, and you have to log out, but when you try to log back in your login does not work. And the only solution I have found is to contact support and have them reset my password to a generic, and then you can change the password and it works for a little while before the problem occurs once again.

Another issue with MacUpdate Desktop is Mac OS Big Sur, because MacUpdate Desktop does not run at all on Big Sur, which is on version 10.16.3 already, so a new version seems a long time coming, especially for a subscription app.

An alternative to MacUpdate is MacUpdater 2 from CoreCode. Unlike MacUpdate it is a one time purchase (at least for version 2, as there is an upgrade from versions 1), and can be had for $14.99 to $35.00 depending on the version.

It also has a Priveleged Install Helper tool so you can install apps that require a password with a single click, and you can have it make app backups of recently installed apps in case one doesn’t work.

It is also Big Sur and Apple Silicon native, which is a big plus. And it has as dark mode unlike MacUpdate. As is the price, which is certainly better.

So I would recommedn MacUpdater from CoreCode and it is what I will be using from now on.

Engadget is reporting that Apple’s M2 Processor has entered production and could arrive by July

Engadget has the news, and that it will again be SOC or system on chip, so integrated CPU, GPU and AI processor.

I am still hoping for eventual external gpu and memory for system and gpu, but that could be unlikely, but hopefully this will at least have support for more than 16GB of Combined RAM and a better GPU.

I hate having Mac’s future so up in the air again. At least with Intel we had a roadmap. Now we will will never know what is coming. And the pro machines won’t cone until the end of the 2 years and I will likely be disappointed with the results, at least at first.