Time for a new Mac

[RROY]

I've been looking at a Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16 GB of ram. Would 16 GB be enough? Some projects have 25 to 35 tracks with sometimes 3 to 5 virtual instruments. Using quite a few plugins when it comes to mixing and mastering. Finally moving on from my mid 2010 Mac Pro. Any words of advice are welcome.
Thanks.

[artfarm1]

I bought mine (MacMini M2Pro 16 gRAM) a couple of months ago, finally putting my 2009 MacPro out of service.

Fantastic in every way! The RAM is plenty for me, as I don't care about 'ready-to-go' orchestral templates with a fully loaded orchestra ready to go at a moments notice

(ie: I don't sit around the house all day making fully blown mock-ups of the Star Wars theme or other orchestral music that has already been recorded by some of the worlds greatest musicians and can never be replicated anyways using a sample library, and I don't get handed film cues that need to be mocked-up within an un-realistic time frame for some unimaginative producers/directors or media corporations that would rather just use AI in the future and replace all the real human musicians with AI generated 'content'.)

Having said that....all of my projects have totally different requirements and this machine is AMAZING in the way it handles everything. I haven't pushed it to see what it can do, but there are people that have posted videos about that.

So great to not have to keep an eye on the CPU meter as I'm trying to work!

I had to do a project and finish it within a week of setting up the new MacMini, and I saved time from just having this machine alone. For the project (opening music for an big outdoor series of events with pre-recorded voice to be played back over a pretty decent sound system) I had the following setup: several instances of Kontakt loaded with brass (Cinesamples, Kirk Hunter, Spitfire, Session Brass), several Kontakt with percussion (Drums of War, others), EZ Drummer 2, several instances of Spitfire BBCSO Pro strings, more Kontakt with several Factory library instruments, 2 instances of Omnisphere, a UVI Falcon instrument, and a Dune 3 instrument. Oh yeah....I also had several iZotope effects running in real time while monitoring with Sonarworks 4 software through my monitors.

I could have never had all these instruments running at the same time on my old 2009, but the M2Pro was barely 'breathing'.

And, everything loaded instantly all the time. Practically instant loading compared to what I've been used to! I mean....like, what's faster than 'instant'? There is no 'faster than instant'! If I had to wait for something to load in, 5 seconds won't kill me. This is a whole new world now.

Plus, I've done a little video editing with iMovie for some short demo things. Easy!

So I'm set for many, many years with this machine unless there are drastic changes in the Apple world and the M2Pro won't be compatible with future OS updates or something.

Note: I'm using all good, fast SSD's of course, and have an OWC Thunderbolt 'breakout box-thing'.

I bought a brand new MOTU M6 interface to go with my new MacMini, and it's excellent. (...that goes without saying!)

Anyways, it's a fantastic computer, Ventura OS is great, and 16 gRAM is fine for getting some serious work accomplished very quickly.

[HCMarkus]

As Artfarm's glowing report suggests, 16GB will probably be plenty for you, RROY.

That said, in light of the fact "You pays your money and you takes your chances" with Apple as far as RAM goes (in other words, RAM is not upgradeable), I would be inclined to allocate funds toward RAM and CPU Cores at the expense of on-board storage. Unlike the SOC and RAM, storage is upgradeable/expandable via Thunderbolt/USB. Although the on-board SSD is the fastest, for audio work, even external SATA SSDs will not slow down or impeded one's workflow appreciably.

With the above in mind, the controlling factor of "How much do I want to spend?" remains. It looks like $400 is what doubling RAM from 16 to 32GB will cost. I don't run huge orchestra mockups (nice description of these, Artfarm!), but have found RAM usage approaching close to 30GB territory on more substantial projects I've worked on with my M1 Mac. But, based on others' reports, disc-swapping is not the end of the world, either.

I think that, whatever Apple Silicon Mac is chosen, our OP is going to be very happy.

[Michael Canavan]

Yep, I did a massive amount of work this summer so far and I'm throwing down for a Mac Studio to just flatly future proof myself for I'm betting a decade.

I've been using an M1 Air for the last couple years and the only complaint is the graphics, it's 7 cores. The Minis have a 10 0r 16 core GPU that should be good for at least two monitors.

Again, I'm going for overkill, because the opportunity is there, but literally the least powerful M1 released, has been good enough.

[mikehalloran]

The Mini M2 Pro can be configured up to 32GB integrated RAM. Although 16GB will accomplish quite a bit now, what will the future bring? None of us knowing that answer makes me recommend maxing out the RAM. If you run into a RAM bottleneck later, you’ll regret not having spent the extra money.

The CPU/GPU up charge benefits you if working in video/AV. If mostly audio, there’s no compelling reason.

The “how much onboard storage?” debate can drive a person nuts but Apple has added a wrinkle that may or may not apply to you. If you are sharing files over the cloud, you want as much internal storage as is possible for you. Since Monterey 12.3, Cloud storage puts the original files in the cloud and you can make them available offline to your internal System drive only, not external storage. This applies to iCloud, Dropbox, GoogleDive, Sync, OneDrive etc.

Other than that, because of the NAND (SSD blades) that Apple is using, the slowest internal storage is the 512GB option and the fastest is the 8TB. Like the CPU/GPU option, speed is a video/AV issue. The slowest M2 Pro is plenty powerful enough for audio.

I've been using an M1 Air for the last couple years and the only complaint is the graphics, it's 7 cores. The Minis have a 10 0r 16 core GPU that should be good for at least two monitors.

Again, I'm going for overkill, because the opportunity is there, but literally the least powerful M1 released, has been good enough.

Yep, graphics/video/AV performance has little effect on audio.

The M1 and M2 Minis support two monitors; the M2 Mini Pro supports three.

[mothra]

I've been looking at a Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16 GB of ram. Would 16 GB be enough? Some projects have 25 to 35 tracks with sometimes 3 to 5 virtual instruments. Using quite a few plugins when it comes to mixing and mastering. Finally moving on from my mid 2010 Mac Pro. Any words of advice are welcome.
Thanks.

That's about my usual track count, with Softube channel strips on every channel, and effects, etc.. Im a Cubase user so the majority of my tracks are all Halion sampler instruments, Pigments/Hive/Juno plugins, drums are all Groove Agent instruments, the rest are my synths/hardware tracked in. You'll be fine with the 16GB model. I got the base model this time, no upgrades so I could walk into the store and bring it home right away. The thing doesn't even flinch. The CPU meter in Cubase is a bit hard to judge due to the 'ASIO Guard' buffer, but with a 25 track project loaded with instruments/plugins, my ASIO Guard meter sits around 20-25%, where the "real time' CPU meter is barely registering now.

Only time I've even heard the fan come on is the first time I opened Dreamweaver of all things, something it was doing was making the fan kick into overdrive for a few seconds. Im an emulation fan as well and a new MAME ROM set came out a couple days ago. Auditing those 20000+ ROMS every month always made the fan in my Intel go into hyperdrive, don't hear a peep out of it now. I did the entire set yesterday morning, both the 'machines' and the 'software lists', in about 20 minutes before I went to work heh. Even pulling the files to audit from an external drive, its waaaaay quicker than it was before..

I replaced my 2010 Pro in 2020 with a 2020 Intel Mini (upgraded to the i7) that blew the Pro away. The M2 Pro eats the Intel model alive, so there is that. For about $400 more then I paid for the upgraded 2020 Mini, I got both the stock M2 Pro Mini for me and I got the misses the 'regular' M2 Mini (and made her a MacOS convert haha). I ordered them online on a Sunday at like 10:30, half hour later when the store opened at 11, they were ready for pickup. By about 2pm, I had the new Mac completely up and Cubase was running, Backblaze migrated over, etc (thank you Apple for the iCloud user account integration making it super easy)..

[artfarm1]

As Artfarm's glowing report suggests, 16GB will probably be plenty for you, RROY.

That said, in light of the fact "You pays your money and you takes your chances" with Apple as far as RAM goes (in other words, RAM is not upgradeable), I would be inclined to allocate funds toward RAM and CPU Cores at the expense of on-board storage. Unlike the SOC and RAM, storage is upgradeable/expandable via Thunderbolt/USB. Although the on-board SSD is the fastest, for audio work, even external SATA SSDs will not slow down or impeded one's workflow appreciably.

With the above in mind, the controlling factor of "How much do I want to spend?" remains. It looks like $400 is what doubling RAM from 16 to 32GB will cost. I don't run huge orchestra mockups (nice description of these, Artfarm!), but have found RAM usage approaching close to 30GB territory on more substantial projects I've worked on with my M1 Mac. But, based on others' reports, disc-swapping is not the end of the world, either.

I think that, whatever Apple Silicon Mac is chosen, our OP is going to be very happy.

As HCMarkus and Mike H say and know, more RAM is something to consider for sure.

If I get to the point where I have nothing better to do than sit around all day and just do full-blown orchestra mock-ups just for kicks, then I'll most likely need to get another Mac with more RAM....but!...there'll be some awesome used/refurbished deals to had in just a couple of years or sooner!

[midilance]

A Mac mini M2 Pro with 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU 19-core Neural Engine, 32 GB of ram, 1TB SSD comes to $2,199.

A Mac Studio M2 Max with a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, COMES WITH 32GB of ram, and a 1TB SSD for $2,199. It also has more ports.

It’s a no-brainer.