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Which Mac mini?
There are many videos on YouTube about which Mac mini is recommended for music production. Some people argue that you need the Mac mini Pro, while others say the regular Mac mini is enough. If you have practical experience, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it. I’m considering an M4 Mac mini with 512GB storage and 16GB RAM. I use Logic Pro and Ableton Live. I usually don’t work with more than 30–40 tracks, and my preferred buffer size is 128.
I think the Mac mini Pro would be overkill, and I don’t think I’d need more than 16GB of RAM either.
Comments
sounds fair.
faced with a similar dilemma, i went with the stock mini (256/16), which was cheap as chips, and bought a fancypants ssd enclosure/dock thing, which cost an eyewatering amount (4tb ssd + a beautiful aluminium paperweight + cables).
objective numbers are here:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
m4 10/10: single 3788, multi 14705
m4 pro 12/16: single 3829, multi 20302
m4 pro 14/20: single 3821, multi 22415
if your livelihood requires that you work as fast as possible at highly-intensive multi-core tasks, get the pro 14/20 (or a mac studio). otherwise, the stock mini is just incredible value imo.
for context, i'm coming from a 2018 mbp, which i still use but it scores a paltry 1258/4912 - so for me everything's 3x faster.
Thank you! I would use the Mac mini only for music creation with Logic and Ableton. Since it's just a hobby I don't need a superfast performance. The only thing I want is to work with max 30-40 tracks at a buffer size of 128 without cracklings.
Audio tracks or MIDI instruments?
With many virtual instruments and effects running, CPU horsepower can make a big difference, depending on which plugins you're using.
Both. I have 2 hw synths, however I mostly rely on virtual instruments, stock plugins of Logic and Ableton, Arturia V Collection. Let's say 70-80% of the tracks are virtual instruments.
OK so you do need a powerful machine. Now looking at the benchmarks, it's not that the m4 10/10 is much slower, and if I had to decide for myself, I'd go with the smaller Mini and render the least edited tracks to audio when audio starts crackling at low buffer sizes.
I have a Mac mini m4 (basic).
Thats all I need.
Bought a hub stand what ever for sd cards and usb A.
I think I can pack the hub with extra ssd…
i've just seen that an m5 mac mini is expected quite soon (possibly june, but it might be delayed because of the ram shortage). rumours are that the base storage will rise to 512gb (with a $100 price bump to $699) but this is unconfirmed.
the m5 10/10 chip gets better benchmark scores than the m4 10/10, as you might expect. in the 2025 macbook pro, it's been scoring 4225 for single-core and 17455 for multi-core performance, so you might get 11.5-18.7% more vsts ("these go to 11").
sorry to muddy the waters, but fyi.
I would rather buy 2 base models then one pro...
As expanders for your keyboards.
I would personally opt for 24GB or more RAM, but YMMV of course. And 1TB+ base storage, plus “external” (in a hub).
Oh, and the Pro CPU, because considerably more P cores (talking M4 terminology here). Ableton and Logic Pro, for example, don’t use E cores, or if they ever do, then barely / poorly. So it depends on DAW, true enough, but I would still in general prefer more P cores (or whatever they’re called now for M5, when they hit the Mini market).
I was just thinking about that today, to render some of the midi tracks to audio. It’s hard to justify the almost double price of the mini pro.
Thanks for the heads up! It’s worth considering waiting until June, since it’s not that far away.
What do you mean by keyboard expander?
This config would be great, but these options drive the price to insane levels.
I've done that before as well: One machine for sequencing/recording, synths and effects, and another used mainly as a sound engine (mostly a ROMpler as we said back in the days
, for split purposes.
That can work if your treat your "sound box" strictly like a preset machine that won't change much.
For me, it didn't turn out like a good idea for two reasons: I did want to try new instruments from time to time so I would have to make notes of which exact instruments and versions I had used for each track (otherwise it would be hard to recall a full project) and Sampled instruments weren't that cpu hungry anyway.
There's software out there to connect virtual instruments from different machines over the local network but I much prefer the render-to-audio approach as I can un-freeze tracks anytime I need to edit something, on the same machine.
One thing to note: Depending on which virtual instruments you're using, the 16GB RAM can fill up quickly with 30-40 tracks, and you can be sure that your Mini will start using the internal SSD for extending virtual memory by paging to swap files, which will be slower than RAM and require considerable disk space.
I would make sure to always keep at least 100GB of storage free for that purpose, so there's not much left for your instrument libraries and audio files, not to mention videos.
But a fast external SSD can work, it's just not that convenient.
Brother my 256 Mac mini couldn’t free up 100 GB if I tried. I know it’s different machines and needs, but that’s just a funny concept to me. I fight tooth and nail to keep 20 GB free with “System Data” taking up 130+ GB and the OS taking up more on top.
If that fight is worth it for you then that's fine!
Oh that fight is definitely not worth it. My first recommendation would be to go for 1 TB of storage if you’re trying to spend your time making music and not on storage management.
Yep, absolutely. If only it wasn't that expensive 🤨
fao @GLacey
https://www.macworld.com/article/3132912/we-might-not-get-another-new-mac-till-2027.html
bear in mind this is an opinion piece, and it uses the word "might"
still, i thought you should know what the whispers are saying.
(and they're saying that a.i. is a hungry hungry hippo)
Go with as much RAM as your budget will allow you. Particularly if you are focussing on software instruments. A good Mac can last you many years and the RAM requirements will only increase as time goes on. If you plan to swap out your computer regularly it might not matter quite as much, but if you are planning to keep it for an extended time the more RAM the better.
Hard drives can be tacked on externally and with the latest Firewire specs the data transfer is good enough to boot an operating system if you need to.