Is my recording setup powerful enough?

jamesblonde

jamesblonde

Member
Hello all,

I have recently gone back down the rabbit hole of misha mansoor’s old covid-era livestreams where he records/mixes in real time. I have learned a ton from his videos. I am currently plugging my axe fx iii directly into a 2025 Mac mini and using the axe fx as my audio interface but this setup doesn’t seem to cut it. What kind of computer/setup do you think misha uses that enables him to run so much midi drum software, synth plugins etc without his computer crashing? My wife is pretty good at building computers so give me some suggestions on what computer setups are powerful enough to handle a bunch of recording/mixing stuff and I’ll see if i can have it built for me. Thanks
 
jamesblonde said:
2025 Mac mini and using the axe fx as my audio interface but this setup doesn’t seem to cut it.
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As somebody who's been digitally recording metal since 1999, this is absolutely crazy to me. The M4 Mini is a beast.

I know at one point he was using one of the iMac Pro models which were beefed up Intel Xeons with tons of RAM, but Apple Silicon holds its own against even top of the line Intel chips these days. About the only thing you'd have issues with is memory usage if you're running tons of virtual instruments, but I've run virtual bass, drums, synth, pino, strings, etc all on a single track without issue on an M1 Air 🤔

You might be running into limitations of the AxeFX as the interface (but I doubt it), in which case you might get better results by getting a dedicated one. IIRC MIsha was using the Clarett line, not sure if he still is.

Side note: You couldn't pay me enough to go back to Windows for recording again. Well, you couldn't pay me enough to go back to Windows for anything these days, but that's a separate rant 😅
 
Mac mini M4 here (16GB version, the cheapest) running big multitrack with FM3 as aggregated device, vst bass, drums, piano, orchestra, etc...
Also using mixing vst in real time (Reaper as DAW).. the Mac mini is an absolute beast!
I'm using a cheap Behringer 1820 and the aggregate device is Behringer + FM3 + usb microphone + virtual cables... no lag, no glitch, nothing.
I'm amazed by the performance for a 500 € mac

That said, I guess you have everything to be operative.
As a suggestion, start with a blank file in your daw and start adding incrementally what you need to perform.
Maybe the culprit is hidden in some virtual instrument or in the mixing vst lane on the output
(e.g. in Reaper the "limiter" is cpu hungry and has 2 options: "high quality" and "low latency".. if you place a limiter in every track and leave it on high quality you can have some lag problems)

Screenshot 2025-12-23 at 11.10.49.png
 
A 2025 Mac mini is absolutely more than enough. The only thing that could bottleneck you is RAM. If you have the model with 16gb and you run a ton of VST, that could be an issue, but that should be manageable. Are you freezing your MIDI tracks once you're done with them ?
 
jamesblonde said:
Hello all,

I have recently gone back down the rabbit hole of misha mansoor’s old covid-era livestreams where he records/mixes in real time. I have learned a ton from his videos. I am currently plugging my axe fx iii directly into a 2025 Mac mini and using the axe fx as my audio interface but this setup doesn’t seem to cut it. What kind of computer/setup do you think misha uses that enables him to run so much midi drum software, synth plugins etc without his computer crashing? My wife is pretty good at building computers so give me some suggestions on what computer setups are powerful enough to handle a bunch of recording/mixing stuff and I’ll see if i can have it built for me. Thanks
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Can you describe the problems you are having? ‘Doesn’t cut it’ gives us no idea of what may be wrong, or how to advise anything.
 
Increase the USB buffer size in your DAW's settings. There is a tradeoff between latency and CPU load. The only time you need to reduce it is when monitoring through your DAW i.e. tracking with software instruments.

Also in larger sessions once you're done with a particular software instrument track you can freeze it. Set the Freeze Mode to "pre fader" and freeze it. Basically this bounces the track to wav behind the scenes so instead of doing all the processing in real time every time you press play, it reduces the CPU consumption of any software instrument tracks to the same as playing a wav file i.e. basically zero. But you can always unfreeze it, make edits, and re-freeze.
 
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alan.thomas said:
A 2025 Mac mini is absolutely more than enough. The only thing that could bottleneck you is RAM. If you have the model with 16gb and you run a ton of VST, that could be an issue, but that should be manageable. Are you freezing your MIDI tracks once you're done with them ?
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No I’ll try this but I’d prefer to have all my drum/synth midi up at all times so I can make adjustments easily
 
Domct203 said:
Can you describe the problems you are having? ‘Doesn’t cut it’ gives us no idea of what may be wrong, or how to advise anything.
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First and foremost, when I’m recording a track, I get this intermittent “chirp/glitch” that completely makes the track I just recorded unusual and messes with my timing while tracking. This intermittent “skip” also happens to my audio when I’m just watching YouTube or listening to music too I have no idea why this happens
 
Dave Merrill said:
I'm confused. That sounds like exactly what i questioned, that an audio interface can't can't be directly to a Mac and work correctly.

???
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Obviously, if that was the actual issue, that would be a workaround for a bug, not that you can't plug an interface directly into your mac by design. Also it's possible that would affect only a specific range of interfaces/mac os version etc.

If we had a bug where the tuner wasn't working on input 2 on the FM9, you couldn't say "That's crazy that you can't use the tuner on input 2"No, you can, it's just not working properly right now
 
So silly me I fixed my “skip” issue. I was using a usb hub to usb c into my Mac. I just bought a usb c cable that plugs directly from my Mac mini to my axe fx and boom. No more glitches or skips. Now my next problem: when I am recording I use the axe fx iii as my interface and Logic Pro as my daw. I was just recording something with two audio channels- one with the axe fx and the other with STL tonality. When I engage cycle recording in logic and move back and forth from the axe edit window back to logic, it completely crashes my project in logic very frequently. Surely only a two channel project on such a powerful computer shouldn’t make logic crash. What am I doing wrong?
 
I have an ancient Mac Mini (first generation, I believe), with minimum amount of RAM, and its most certainly absolutely fine for recording and mixing, especially if you’re using a Fractal device, not amp sims. It’s performing way better than any previous computer I had.

I periodically think about replacing it but then realize that there’s nothing practical that it cannot do.

The only time it crapped out was when I tried to stream 4 Full HD cameras plus 4K screen share plus Gig Performer running NDSP plugins through OBS Studio and Zoom with high quality stereo audio (which in itself went through SoundDesk software mixer with effects, all with 64 sample buffer). That was too much for the poor thing. But all the computers I had without dedicated video cards would’ve crapped out on such a load, too.

Unless your projects have hundreds of tracks you should be fine.
 
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