M2 Pro MacMini

Sure, but I'm just saying streaming places more of a performance demand on access speed than a typical database application. If a query is occasionally a little slow, nobody will notice. A streaming underrun on the other hand can be a big problem. I've spent many hours optimizing streaming code :). My point is an SSD is preferable to a hard drive for music production and I'm sure you'll be happy with an SSD.
 
GlennO said:
Database applications that require real-time, repeated access patterns like streaming are relatively rare. Considering the context implied by the musical application forum we're posting on, that's a particularly relevant generalization.
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Right....the samples are read into RAM once and generally left there unless the computer decides it needs that RAM for something else. DB disc needs are a lot more intense. Or, at least, they can be.

And neither wears out SSDs. It's writing that wears them out. And, again, unless you're talking about petabytes worth of writes, it isn't a relevant concern.

Say you've got 100 audio tracks that are all uncompressed floating point WAVs and maybe 150 MB each. Even if they have to stream off disk, that's 15GB that you have to read over the course of, say, 3 minutes. A half-modern SATA SSD can do that in about 25 seconds. So, they're sitting there idle or doing something else for 83% of the time you have allotted. A half-modern NVMe drive does it in < 5 seconds.

Musical applications don't stress SSDs. At all. In any way.
 
This is getting off-topic, but sample streaming is the process of loading multisampled audio into a sample playback instrument. That's different than playing back recorded audio tracks like you're describing, and has different performance demands on the disk. And I have a multitude of customers around the world who would vehemently disagree with you that sample streaming doesn't stress SSD's :). I was simply saying that these performance demands are different than what you find in a database application, and Greg will be happy with an SSD.
 
Today got the email my Mac Mini M2Pro is ready for pickup. Can't wait to get it after work...funny how you adjust when you don't have a working computer. Like the scene at the end of The Cable Guy and city wide cable outage. People start coming out of their homes to blue sky and fresh air. Gotta read up on what i'll need to get my Axe Fx 3 back in action with the apple silicon in this new mac. Not sure if i'll have to get the new USB driver or what for Axe Edit
 
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I just got one of these. For $99 a month I don’t see how I could go wrong - except for the iLok and Toontrack pain I am about to endure. Luckily the Mac being transferred from is still online so maybe, just maybe, it won’t be too bad.
 
There is nothing special that needs to be done for Axe-FX connection. It's a class compliant device, so no driver is needed (although there is new usb firmware available today). Migration Assistant works pretty well for painless transfers to a new system.

I've been doing some benchmarks with the M2 Pro and it runs rings around my i7, even in Rosetta mode. And it's comparable to my i9. The cpu on this thing is impressive. And quiet in the studio even when under a load.

One thing I will point out about the M2 Macmini: there is a significant increase in performance between the 512 GB SSD the 1TB. If you plan on doing streaming from the internal drive, the internal SSD performance will be important and I would recommend the 1TB for that reason.
 
Im' looking forward to the increased performance over my old i7 intel mini. speaking of...i'll be getting that back too. they reapplied some thermal paste on heat sink but said it was still failing cooling tests. I read up a bit on this and seems there was issues reported by many users with 2018 mac minis..some threads suggesting using different thermal pastes than what Apple uses. Perhaps after getting the new machine all setup I'll mess around with that and then I'll have a second mac to use for whatever
 
So I got my M2 pro mini. I have to say it was pretty painless transferring all my plugins etc from the old DAW to the new. I was up and running in less than 2 hours. My pain last time largely revolved around the fact the hard drive crashed so it was offline and the iLok plugins couldn’t be deauthorized without intervention.

Man this thing rips! Additionally, I have no perceived latency when running the NDSP plugins. My old DAW was pretty capable (i9 iMac 40gigs of Ram) but I had to run in low latency mode a lot when monitoring input. I heavily process any amp sim plugins because I am so used to the Axe just sounding plain awesome.

I will often run Fabfilter EQ, MB comp with Saturn and Soothe 2. This adds a lot of latency when monitoring the input. The M2 pro handles it all while monitoring input at the lowest Logic latency setting! Pretty crazy to watch the CPU monitor with 10 hardly used cores. I am also getting 400 mb/s read with external thunderbolt ssd storage. The drives are about 3 years old so not up to M2 speeds for sure but it’s plenty fast enough for now.
 
MSS said:
So I got my M2 pro mini. I have to say it was pretty painless transferring all my plugins etc from the old DAW to the new. I was up and running in less than 2 hours. My pain last time largely revolved around the fact the hard drive crashed so it was offline and the iLok plugins couldn’t be deauthorized without intervention.

Man this thing rips! Additionally, I have no perceived latency when running the NDSP plugins. My old DAW was pretty capable (i9 iMac 40gigs of Ram) but I had to run in low latency mode a lot when monitoring input. I heavily process any amp sim plugins because I am so used to the Axe just sounding plain awesome.

I will often run Fabfilter EQ, MB comp with Saturn and Soothe 2. This adds a lot of latency when monitoring the input. The M2 pro handles it all while monitoring input at the lowest Logic latency setting! Pretty crazy to watch the CPU monitor with 10 hardly used cores. I am also getting 400 mb/s read with external thunderbolt ssd storage. The drives are about 3 years old so not up to M2 speeds for sure but it’s plenty fast enough for now.
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good to know. I've been slowly adding back all my programs and have yet to run my DAWs but things are much snappier in general I've already noticed.
 
Encountered the drawbacks of current tech today. My trusty Steinberg CMC hardware modules (3 of them) are not compatible with Ventura. The CC121 ironically is despite being older (I believe) than the CMC units. My CMC's were an integral part of my workflow. Shame they can't update the drivers for these perfectly good and effective controllers.
Steinberg CMC AI/CH/FD/TP Cubase Controller image 1
 
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