is a mac mini a good idea with protoolS LE production tool??

[metascanner]

i work on protools LE with music production tool kit .
i am on powerbook and im waiting for the new generation or laptop and to have more money ...
i want to know if mac mini ,is a good idea or stupid ?
i talk about the speed reaction, latence and calcul processing speed of course ...

thanx

[dougied]

I have an older Mac Mini Intel 1.66GHZ Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and it screams pretty good. I also have the Music Production Toolkit installed and it plays well together.

I can get a decent track count with plugins running in real-time and it blows my mind how this little baby can handle it. I just upgraded to a Mac Pro Dual Quad, but my Mini still has everything on it.

Just make sure you get an External Firewire Hard Drive with the Oxford 911, 912, or 924 chipset. I went and spent the money on a GLYPH GT050Q and got that out of the way. It's a great litle rig!!





-Doug

[RangerJay]

I just upgraded from a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo Mini to a 2.4 GHz iMac. That little Mini did just fine with an MBox 2 and an external drive. Reasonable track count and plug in capability. However, I did not run Leopard on it. I did upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM (did it myself with a putty knife).

Just keep in mind that a Mini is essentially a laptop without a screen or keyboard.

[bvcreative]

I use a Mac Mini w/2GB RAM to run an 003 Factory system, and it works well. As with any LE system, if you start piling on the processor-intensive plugins in a session it will start to have issues (unless you are running with a massive machine) but this has been my experience with the Mini.

Usually when I start finding I have too many plug-ins I will try to print some effects to a track and save the un-processed version in my region list if I ever need to go back to it. This will allow me to keep going and not bog the system down over too many active plug-ins at once.

It sux that I have to conserve in this way, but until I can afford (or need, really) an HD system that offloads processor power for plug-ins I guess this is the best way.

One thing to note is that if you are getting a new Mac Mini they are shipping with Leopard, and you'll be stuck using the pre-release version of PT until they get the Leopard version finished.

[metascanner]

ok guys , thanx a lot for your answers !!! very nice ....

so everybody love mini but everybody moved to another computer ?? lol ...weird, no ?

someone say ;

"Just make sure you get an External Firewire Hard Drive with the Oxford 911, 912, or 924 chipset."

dont understand why you say that ? what is an oxford 911 .... ? its a particular norm ?


and someone else said ;

"Just keep in mind that a Mini is essentially a laptop without a screen or keyboard."

very interesting way of think but you have to travel with you keyboard ? ... you do ?

[RangerJay]

The Mini essentially is a notebook motherboard, notebook memory, notebook hard drive, and notebook DVD/CD drive encased in a small form box. It even has a notebook-style fan in it!

It doesn't have a screen or keyboard. You just hook up your own. I had a 24" LCD hooked up to mine, and it worked great. I moved on to an iMac for the faster processor and dual-monitor capability. It doesn't hurt having 4GB of RAM, either.

The iMac is also a lot like a notebook, only you don't ever close it, and it doesn't have an attached keyboard, though it does ship with a nice cabled one. Faster bus, faster hard drive, and more ports than the Mini. The iMac screen is a pleasure to work with. Probably one of the best computer purchases I've ever made, and I've made a lot. I probably have 10 computers of various flavors sitting around here...

For my needs, it is a perfect fit. PT LE runs nicely on it, though I haven't put it through the paces, yet. I am working on another couple of projects in Logic at the moment. I also run PT LE on a Vista box, and it works very well (it has a UAD card in it, which I love). I am not a Mac fanatic, just a happy user.

[metascanner]

ok thanx a lot for this info ...

[alex s]

I'm running a mac mini (originally 1.6 core duo) with a core 2 duo 2.33 processor in it. (2 Gig RAM
M Powered PT 7.4 OSX 10.4.11)

I'm running 48 track sessions all the time, and I can fill up ALL the plugin spaces with medium CPU intensive plugins without a problem.

on the other end of the scale I can run 48 instances of URS CSP before the machine starts to slow down.

I'm bouncing back to sessions, so it's actually disk access (Playback from USB 2 external drives) that hinders the proceedings before processing power does.

I highly recommend buying an old core solo Mini and putting a T7600 chip in it...

I got mine cheap off ebay so it was still cost effective.

Been running this setup for over a year and no problems.. touch wood.