Ableton Forum

Hey guys, kind of an odd question:

I need to buy an old Mac, to run One piece of outdated music software.

I'm obviously not trying to spend a ton of money on a secondary computer for one program, so my question is: is the minimum specs stated to run the software really the minimum specs? Or do you typically need to go beyond the minimum specs in most cases? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Depends on the software and the use of it.

Minimum specs will cover being able to open the software and use it to a very basic degree. With games this will mean you can get the game to load and if you have every setting on Low you will get some kind of FPS out of it.

With something like Music software I would look at it with the mind that if the minimum specs describe your machine, you could not expect too much at all from the software.

May help others to know what software you are talking about.

cmreal04 wrote:Hey guys, kind of an odd question:

I need to buy an old Mac, to run One piece of outdated music software.

I'm obviously not trying to spend a ton of money on a secondary computer for one program, so my question is: is the minimum specs stated to run the software really the minimum specs? Or do you typically need to go beyond the minimum specs in most cases? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Usually you want recommended specs but it depends on the software and nature/importance of the software.

@cm, what's the old software? Possibly one of us has real-world experience of running it on an old Mac?

Alright well that pretty much answers that, I'll go a little too heavy on the ram then. I need it to run my feeltune rhizome le software. I upgraded my main machine,which led to my current problem...

cmreal04 wrote:Alright well that pretty much answers that, I'll go a little too heavy on the ram then. I need it to run my feeltune rhizome le software. I upgraded my main machine,which led to my current problem...

I'm assuming Mac there...

This is one thing that turned me off the whole apple ecosystem. Things become incompatible far too fast in that world. Hell, I still have the very first song I created back in 1996 in Fasttracker and I still have a way to load Fasttracker on Windows 10 machine. I can still install Buzz tracker, scream tracker, Cubase SX3.... everything I have used in 2 decades. If required, install a VM and install XP so I can get Dos back if I really wanted.

Yeah it's pretty frustrating.

I have the rhizome installer saved on a Zip drive (Mac) but the installer isn't even available online otherwise.

I keep my 2002 tibook around for opening legacy projects in OS9. I think it's just the same as keeping a vintage guitar around for a unique sound.

cmreal04 wrote:
I need to buy an old Mac, to run One piece of outdated music software.

Which is Feeltune Rhizome? What is the latest it runs on?

As it would seem this OS X Intel, then could a virtualized system work?

Here's the specs:

Intel Core Duo processor
OS X 10.6 or 10.7 (latest update)
2 GB RAM


I won't pretend I know how to virtualized system works.


Any ideas based on that, what my best option is? To support those specs.

cmreal04 wrote:Here's the specs:

Intel Core Duo processor
OS X 10.6 or 10.7 (latest update)
2 GB RAM


I won't pretend I know how to virtualized system works.


Any ideas based on that, what my best option is? To support those specs.

Well, Wmware Fusion (Commercial) or Oracle VM VirtualBox (Open Source and free) or Parallels (Commercial) all probably require too much CPU for this to be practical in a VM.

The best option I can see is to get a newer main quadcore machine on the second hand market and use the one you have now for running the old system you ask about.

Yeah, unfortunately that's what I was thinking.

Hey guys, I just bought an older Mac Pro and I'm starting to work through a couple snags:

I've added a couple of my sample libraries (wav), but they appear as iTune wav files on my drive.

Do you know what I need to do, in order to have these show up as just wav files?