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SD3 3.4 is buggy and slow on Apple M4 Studio (Sequoia)

Superior Drummer 3 Help

• Posted May 15, 2025 at 11:27 #3407239
  jeantue

  Participant

  I’m posting this as information for other users. I don’t think I’m going to get any usable help here if it’s like the week+ email exchange I’ve just had that led nowhere.

  I was psyched to get an Apple Studio M4 so I could stop having to print every SW instrument. On this computer, Logic really is amazing at handling multiple SW instruments, samplers, heavy oversampling plugins, etc. All at super low buffer settings, enabling me to work with much lower latency.

  All except SD3. Unfortunately, SD3 is not one of the SW instruments that performs better. It actually performs worse than it did on my intel Mac Mini. It’s worse in that,  And there are also some glaring new bugs that demonstrate that the lads here really haven’t tested the SW properly on the new Macs and so probably should not be saying that it works on them.

  Worst bugs:

  • Despite the massive processing speed and capacity upside offered by this M4 Studio computer, there’s basically no real-world change in how much SD3 chokes. It still causes Logic to throw midi sync errors, crashing songs during recording and mixing. Increasing the buffer until Logic is basically unusable for making music helps a little, but does not eliminate the issue. And there are plenty of other samplers out there who have this figured out. Kontakt is not crashing my sessions at low buffer settings. Nor is the fabulous Rhodes plugin. With specs like these, I should not have to crank the buffer and lose the music.
  • In some kits, when I try to change an instrument in the kit, like swap in a Ludwig kick in place of the Gretsch kick, the graphic changes. Ah yes, there’s the Gretsch being swapped in. BUT THE SOUND DOES NOT CHANGE. All kicks sound exactly the same. Sometimes it gets more complicated than that. For example, I try to change snares and it’s clearly swapping a sweetener sound in or out, like adding a looser snare or that dumb little cymbal on top of that one snare. BUT THE CORE SOUND DOESN’T CHANGE. Strangely, in the same kit the tom instruments or cymbals might swap sounds just fine.
  • Sometimes I’ll load a kit in a session with pre-existing midi files and SD3 WILL NOT PLAY ANY VELOCITY VARIATION FROM THE MIDI – it just plays all sounds at the same low velocity, like someone is drumming in monotone. Sounds terrible of course. Maybe it is reading the velocities but for some reason is not accessing and serving the sample accordingly. That would sorta family with the above issue, so I bet something is going on in that chain of events.

  No, it’s not my computer or Logic. With the exception of the midi sync crashing, it did not do these other things on my intel Mac. I checked this all out with Apple Pro support yesterday. They even confirmed the SD3 install was proper. By playing with Audio settings and turning tracks on and off, we isolated these issues to SD3 software, which they suggested I uninstall and reinstall. I did that. It didn’t help.

  So my conclusion is that the SW has not been tested and updated properly enough for it to be useful on the new Macs. Because of the midi sync issue alone, it should definitely not be described on the Toontrack website as working with current Macs and Apple OS. Because you know why musicians buy new expensive Macs? So their SW instruments and heavy plugins will work better, of course. Some honest info there would have saved me a lot of time personally. I will be interested to hear when the plugin has been updated, but until then I will need to use other SW and maybe my sharing here will save someone else some time & frustration. Thanks

  
  Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.0
  Operating system: macOS Sequoia (15)
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