Help me Spec Out Dedicated Mac Mini

For the longest time I have shared my I-7, 16GB I-Mac with my HW organ. Now the organ and the home office are different places in the house. I cannot afford a Mac Pro to drive HW and a Keytec monitor, so that leaves the Mac Mini. I only have a couple own wet Baroque sample sets and doubt I will ever have a big Romantic organ. Baroque is my bag.

16GB of RAM is a given, but should I invest in a SSD? Should I pay for a faster processor, or is the cheapest Mac Mini processor sufficient? I have no idea if/how much a fast processor would affect playing my organ samples.

Thanks in advance for any help. No, I don't want to go to a Windows computer to save money.

I see where the 27" iMac can go to 32G memory which would make me feel better about the $2000 cost. Hope I got that right... At least it would be an i7 with future expansion a possibility. I see it can be configured with SSD drives so that would speed organ loading, or if you went with a 512GB SSD you could have room for the OS as well as the HW cache so the whole machine would fly faster. My opinion based on using a Mac mini (i7 late 2012) which I really like except for the memory limitation.

I suggest you simply follow Hauptwerk's recommendations.

A solid state drive will have no effect on how the organ plays, neither will a vast
excess of ram above what the organ needs.

An average modern processor is fast enough to play any organ, you will not notice
any difference if you go for an ultra fast one.

I find Hauptwerk runs just as well on a modest Windows computer as it does on
an expensive iMac.

csw900

[mdyde]

Hello Henrius,

This document (linked to from the Prerequisites page on the website) has general background information on computer hardware:

https://www.hauptwerk.com/clientuploads/documentation/PDF/HauptwerkBackgroundTechnicalInfoOnComputerHardware.pdf

My brief general thoughts on the current Mac Minis would be:

- Their main limitations are 16 GB of RAM and that only dual-core CPUs are available for them (not quad-core).

- There are a lot of current/recent sample sets that need more CPU power and RAM than that. Small/medium baroque sample sets are less of an issue, but newer sample sets tend to be larger than older ones (surround-sound, etc.), so tend to need more CPU/RAM resources.

- Given that the Mac Minis are limited to dual-core, my recommendation would be to get the faster CPU option available for them (currently 3.0 GHz dual-core i7).

- Likewise for the maximum RAM (16 GB).

- An SSD makes a big difference to loading times (but not to real-time playing performance).

- Much more powerful 27-inch iMacs are available (currently up to 32 GB, 4.0 GHz quad-core i7). However, then you have a built-in monitor screen, which may be irrelevant for some Hauptwerk users.

My organ and home office will soon be separated too, so I had the same need as you have, to buy a dedicated HW computer.

My choice was to buy a second mac pro 2008 refurbished on ebay. Mine (with the usual two quadcore xeons running at 2.8Ghz) came from Germany with 48Gb of ram for 599 euros. It was much cheaper than a high end mac mini, but of course, it is quite a bit larger, so the available space might be a factor too.

It seems it won't be supported with the next iteration of osx (or macos as it should now on be called) which is not a big problem I suppose for at least a few years.

A quick look on ebay shows quite a few mac pro 2008 (look for mac pro 3.1, or apple A1186) with plenty of ram for very attractive prices. (For example, 399$ with 16Gb, yosemite installed...)

Replace the stock ati 2600 with a low-end fanless video card (such as a nvidia GT610 or GT730) for pc (for a cost around 30$ I suppose). You'll lose the bootscreen, but will have a very quiet and powerful enough computer for hauptwerk.

phjo

Hello Henrius,

This document (linked to from the Prerequisites page on the website) has general background information on computer hardware:

https://www.hauptwerk.com/clientuploads/documentation/PDF/HauptwerkBackgroundTechnicalInfoOnComputerHardware.pdf

My brief general thoughts on the current Mac Minis would be:

- Their main limitations are 16 GB of RAM and that only dual-core CPUs are available for them (not quad-core).

- There are a lot of current/recent sample sets that need more CPU power and RAM than that. Small/medium baroque sample sets are less of an issue, but newer sample sets tend to be larger than older ones (surround-sound, etc.), so tend to need more CPU/RAM resources.

- Given that the Mac Minis are limited to dual-core, my recommendation would be to get the faster CPU option available for them (currently 3.0 GHz dual-core i7).

- Likewise for the maximum RAM (16 GB).

- An SSD makes a big difference to loading times (but not to real-time playing performance).

- Much more powerful 27-inch iMacs are available (currently up to 32 GB, 4.0 GHz quad-core i7). However, then you have a built-in monitor screen, which may be irrelevant for some Hauptwerk users.

Thanks Martin! You are a swell guy to answer all our questions.

I ran into two quad-core Mac Minis on Amazon. One is older and costs $860, the other runs "OS X Server" with I-7 quad core. Is "OS X Server" capable of running Hauptwerk? Everyone seems to be upbeat on these pre-2015 Mac Minis, and I might buy one.

Of course, a step up would be a quad-core 27" I-Mac capable of 32GB RAM for more money, but I would get an integral screen I really do not need.