Mac Mini M-Box Dave C tests

[tele_player]

16yearsjeff - 768M should be fine for tracking with no plugins. Use Activity Monitor to verify that. If 'page outs' isn't climbing steadily, you have enough RAM. An even better view of this is to run the 'top' program in a terminal window. It displays 'page outs in the last second' in parentheses; if it's almost always 0 you're OK.

I don't know offhand what's up in your case, but others have recommended using a second Firewire interface in the PC slot of the powerbook for improved reliability duing live recording.

[16yearsjeff]

hmmm...
i'll check it out. this has happened to me more than once. when i'm recording 18 tracks all at once, and i'm recording a bands entire set, when i get 3 or 4 songs into it, it gives me a cant retrieve audio fast enough (something like that) what i try to do is after every song or 2 i stop, hit save and start again. it's just that i cant always do that (especially if i'm playing in the band at the same time) do you think that maybe i am recording to too big a drive (an empty, unpartitioned, lacie d2 connected via fw800,200gig)

[16yearsjeff]

i'm sorry, i should have started a new thread

[John H]

Have any Mac Mini owners done the Dave C test on an Intel C2D model recording to an external Oxford 911 based drive?

The 1.42Ghz G4 Mac Mini recording to a USB 2.0 drive gets 24 tracks and that's more than double what I get at either 24 or 16 bit with an Mbox 2 on my 800Mhz Quicksilver with 1Gb RAM recording to a dedicated 7200rpm audio drive on it's own ATA bus!

My current mac is only getting 5 more tracks in the Dave C test than the 300Mhz G3 it replaced. It had 320Mb RAM recording to the same 120Gb Western Digital drive on it's own ATA bus with an Audiomedia III PCI card and Pro Tools LE 5.

I have a chance of getting hold of a mac mini that's less than 2 years old once I've got the cash together.

It would be a tie over system so I can leave the PowerPC world behind and upgrade to Pro Tools LE 8/Leopard.

The following specs are what I'm aiming for:

Mac Mini (any CPU to start with, I can add a 2.2Ghz C2D at a later date, unless I end up with a 2Ghz system to start with and it's not worth it)

3Gb RAM (synthetic benchmarks show that 3Gb doesn't do any real harm to CPU power, maybe a 5% reduction at most and it's a cheap upgrade)

External Oxford 911 enclosure with the single platter, 7200rpm seagate drive the Quadzilla system uses

At a later date, I'd be replacing the internal 5,400rpm 2.5" drive with an SSD for faster boot ups, patch loading and virtual memory. You can already get 64Gb Samsung SSDs for £99

Thanks in advance. It's being my first post on here for a long time