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Need newer mac mini advice

KarenR said:
More great advice, thank you! I checked the M1 with the mentioned specs but it says "out of stock". Not sure how frequently these are added. I'll see if FB marketplace has anything.

Edit: I found a perfect one on FB market place still under warranty with receipts for everything, for $1900 but it's cash only and they're a 5 hour drive away! 😭
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Grrr. . . . it is now showing Out of Stock for me as well. Just a few hours ago I had the option to buy.
 
KarenR said:
Which hub do you have/recommend?
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I use a CalDigit Element for my SSD box which is
a) overkill, but I have so many drives and I prefer as high transfer rates as possible with my USB4 cabinets.
b) a bit expensive, due to being Thunderbolt 4 and not just a USB hub

...but I also got the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Dock which comes with five USB-A ports. The TB3 version went on sale here as TB4 editions came out, and that would do the job as well. Any sensible external SSD would likely be 5 Gbps USB anyway.
 
Jett Hitt said:
my experience has been that you can't ever have enough RAM,
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I haven't been able to max out 64GB, but I also haven't felt the need to load billions of mic positions.

That's not disagreeing with your experience, of course, just saying it's mine.

But I wouldn't want to buy a machine with less than 64GB either.

Jbuhler: 1TB will be sufficient for a desktop situation
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It will, but you have to be very careful when downloading libraries not to put them on your system drive. For example, Native Access does let you specify where the libraries are going, but it's not obvious where that is. And if you don't, it'll put them in your Applications folder, which is not where they belong.

EDIT: Moving the libraries after they're installed by Native Access is very easy. My point is just that you're going to get frustrated if you try to download libraries onto a system drive that's too small.

And 1TB seems about right on that account.
 
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Can someone do a quick clarification/explanation for me? When talking about CPU, there's the computer CPU itself, and then there's the DAW CPU. I always thought the DAW CPU would max out and cause delays/clicking/cutting out regardless of how much CPU was on a computer (thus causing me to have to constantly change back and forth from MIDI to audio). So where does the importance of computer CPU play in this?

Again, thanks for everyone's help!
 
KarenR said:
Can someone do a quick clarification/explanation for me? When talking about CPU, there's the computer CPU itself, and then there's the DAW CPU. I always thought the DAW CPU would max out and cause delays/clicking/cutting out regardless of how much CPU was on a computer (thus causing me to have to constantly change back and forth from MIDI to audio). So where does the importance of computer CPU play in this?

Again, thanks for everyone's help!
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The DAW runs on the computer. There is no difference between the CPU for the computer and the DAW. Modern CPUs have multiple cores and threads, and the DAW may or may not use all of them. It’s also possible to overwhelm one thread or core since audio processing of each track often has to take place on the same core, and if the track is heavy in CPU hungry effects it might not be able to keep up. Time stretching is another CPU hungry task. In any case you can overwhelm one core even as you have plenty of capacity on other cores. This is why some will say that the clock rate of the CPU is more important for audio than the number of cores.
 
jbuhler said:
The DAW runs on the computer. There is no difference between the CPU for the computer and the DAW. Modern CPUs have multiple cores and threads, and the DAW may or may not use all of them. It’s also possible to overwhelm one thread or core since audio processing of each track often has to take place on the same core, and if the track is heavy in CPU hungry effects it might not be able to keep up. Time stretching is another CPU hungry task. In any case you can overwhelm one core even as you have plenty of capacity on other cores. This is why some will say that the clock rate of the CPU is more important for audio than the number of cores.
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Very insightful, thank you. If a core is overwhelmed it doesn't just automatically move to the next core?
 
KarenR said:
Very insightful, thank you. If a core is overwhelmed it doesn't just automatically move to the next core?
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It can’t for a lot of audio processing because it needs to be handled sequentially and the cores are parallel or so I understand it.
 
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