Ram

Goodmorning everyone.
Let me introduce myself. I have no degree in organ. I often read your forum and I am very favorably impressed by your high professionalism, competence and, above all, by your availability towards newbies as I am. I have been playing occasionally at home and in the church for over 10 years with an Ahlborn praeludium III (2 keyboards, 30-note pedalboard, 24 registers, 10 pins for the adjustable combinations having 50 memories each and unions and unfortunately only one expression bracket). I have installed Hauptwerk V advanced, working with a Mac-mini (16Gb Ram, 1Tera memory, i7 processor, ausus touch screen, two stereo speakers and high quality headphones. I currently use medium sized simples, such as: Friesach, Caen surround 2 St. Etienne, Krzeszow, etc. But I am prevented from playing larger virtual organs, due to my computer's limited RAM.

Allow me to ask you the following question and thank you in advance.
1. My Mac-mini can't stand an increase in RAM, because it has memory built into the main logic board, which can't handle more RAM. Therefore the only solution is to get rid of my Mac-mini - just two years old - and replace it with a computer with larger RAM, at an excessive cost for my meager finances. I kindly ask you, in your experience, what inopportunity and / or loss of sound quality would I experience if I replaced my Mac-mini with a less expensive Windows computer?
2. I ask musicians who are familiar with hauptwerk technology: It is true that it is advisable not to use the computer with which you play virtual organs for any other purpose: for example, for research with OVP producers; to create files bearing annotations, reviews and / or comments of musical scores or other genres? In that case what inconveniences would I encounter?
Thank you very much.

Others will no doubt have more to add, but here is my take:

1. A PC will probably be less expensive for the same RAM and other specs, but you will have to do more to optimize it so there aren't any audio glitches and it runs well with Hauptwerk. You shouldn't experience any loss of sound or problems, unless you don't have the technical skills to optimize it for Hauptwerk.

2. I only have 16GB of memory on my computer, and I use it for a lot of non-Hauptwerk related tasks, many of them very memory intensive (like video and audio editing, desktop publishing of large files). However, when I run Hauptwerk, I am careful that it is the only program running, and I am very careful not to overfill my memory when running Hauptwerk if I have to run another program along side (like a coding program, I'm usually way under the usual recommended minimums). It is definitely recommended to have a dedicated computer for Hauptwerk, particularly if you are not tech savvy and will have trouble taking care of problems if you overfill the RAM, etc.

Goodmorning everyone.
Let me introduce myself. I have no degree in organ. I often read your forum and I am very favorably impressed by your high professionalism, competence and, above all, by your availability towards newbies as I am. I have been playing occasionally at home and in the church for over 10 years with an Ahlborn praeludium III (2 keyboards, 30-note pedalboard, 24 registers, 10 pins for the adjustable combinations having 50 memories each and unions and unfortunately only one expression bracket). I have installed Hauptwerk V advanced, working with a Mac-mini (16Gb Ram, 1Tera memory, i7 processor, ausus touch screen, two stereo speakers and high quality headphones. I currently use medium sized simples, such as: Friesach, Caen surround 2 St. Etienne, Krzeszow, etc. But I am prevented from playing larger virtual organs, due to my computer's limited RAM.

Allow me to ask you the following question and thank you in advance.
1. My Mac-mini can't stand an increase in RAM, because it has memory built into the main logic board, which can't handle more RAM. Therefore the only solution is to get rid of my Mac-mini - just two years old - and replace it with a computer with larger RAM, at an excessive cost for my meager finances. I kindly ask you, in your experience, what inopportunity and / or loss of sound quality would I experience if I replaced my Mac-mini with a less expensive Windows computer?
2. I ask musicians who are familiar with hauptwerk technology: It is true that it is advisable not to use the computer with which you play virtual organs for any other purpose: for example, for research with OVP producers; to create files bearing annotations, reviews and / or comments of musical scores or other genres? In that case what inconveniences would I encounter?
Thank you very much.

The Mac Mini has been upgraded to use at least 32GB of RAM and possibly 64GB of RAM. So you could keep the same environment as your present Mac Mini but have a larger RAM capacity. I think the model which has this capability is the 2018-2019 8.1. So you can possibly keep your Mac-Mini and have your memory too.

Thomas

Yes, the current generation of Mac Minis have 64GB RAM versions - but the price is eye-watering. I've bought it as a special birthday present to myself to power a 3-manual console I've got on order, but for a 2-manual console I'd probably have been happy with something smaller. I'm hoping to get a 10 year life out of it.

Like everything to do with organ playing and computers - and life - some compromise is essential. The only question is what.

Goodmorning everyone.
I kindly ask you, in your experience, what inopportunity and / or loss of sound quality would I experience if I replaced my Mac-mini with a less expensive Windows computer?

This question was over looked. If you are using the Mac's built in headphone/output stereo jack and move to a PC, yes you will loose sound quality and probably gain some latency. Simple reason, Macs are standard with professional quality D/A circuitry where as Win-PCs are not. For a PC you will need a external audio interface (or DAC if using just headphones) to achieve the same stereo quality sound. If you want to upgrade to a mult-channel configuration, an audio interface is required for either platform (Mac / PC).

Danny B.