Ableton Forum

Hey. I wanted to see if anyone else was out there with some ideas about this. I right now use a macbook pro...2 years old...but am using mostly in the studio. I just picked up a 32" LCD monitor...and was thinking about getting a mac. I was looking at the mac store today...and saw that the 3.06 mac mini's are super cheap. Now, obviously there are difference between the tower and mac mini's, but are there any real downfalls to buying a mac mini vs. a tower. Those towers are so damn expensive, and since I am just using in a home studio...all ableton live....will it be fine? It seems like it would be work just fine...but is there a difference. Also, is there a difference between the macbook pro's and the minis....

No graphics necessary...just pure noise!

Thanks for your help!

FroBot

that will maybe not help but why dont you plug your screen in your macbook pro and an external mouse+keyboard?

I do it like this and it works like a charm (plus I got a second screen

I am doing that now of course!

Just wondering about a new computer.

It should be no surprise that the internals of a Mac Mini are basically those of a MacBook. If you're not pushing the limits with track counts, CPU-hungry VSTs and such the Mini should do the job OK.

Towers are more for pro studios who need the extra horsepower.

doghouse wrote:It should be no surprise that the internals of a Mac Mini are basically those of a MacBook. If you're not pushing the limits with track counts, CPU-hungry VSTs and such the Mini should do the job OK.

Towers are more for pro studios who need the extra horsepower.

+1

So my macbook pro is more of a powerhorse than the mac mini so to say?

My Mac Mini is awesome . I had an old G5 tower that died on me a few months ago. So, I bought the Mini as a temporary replacement to hold me off until the New i5/i7 Macbook Pros were released. All I can say is the Mini is a little work horse. I've been really pushing it and it's handled everything surprisingly well. Also, I agree that the Mini is like the Pre-i5/i7 Macbook Pro, but without the screen and keyboard.

The only thing I miss from my G5 tower is the PCI card slots. I have UAD cards, and the Mini doesn't have any PCI slots

I posted my specs on the "LIVE 8 PERFORMANCE TEST - Results Here" thread a while back:

Frank003 wrote:1. Ableton Live CPU Meter 50%
2. Laptop/Desktop? Make/Model? Mac Mini
3. Operating System? OSX 10.6.2
4. Ableton Live version? 8.1.1
5. CPU Make, Model, and Speed? Intel Core2Duo 2.53 GHz
6. Amount of Ram? 4GB
7. Soundcard (and driver version if you know it)? MOTU MKII 828 Driver Version 1.4.12
8. Hard Disk Drive Speed (if you know)? 5400RPM
9. Number of playback tracks? 8

I Updated some things:
OSX 10.6.3
Live 8.1.3 (Works Much Better than 8.1.1)
Temporary Soundcard: NI Audio DJ 8 (I'm in the process of getting a New Soundcard)

tripandball wrote:So my macbook pro is more of a powerhorse than the mac mini so to say?

In general, the latest entry level Mac Mini http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/m ... specs.html
has the same bus architecture of the others with a 1066 DDR3 RAM spec, that sure wasn't there 2 years ago (I guess you have a Santa Rosa MBP with 800 Mhz RAM speed (DDR2). Don't be fooled by CPU Speed alone. It's what's built around that counts. Tower Map Pro are really super expensive and sport a Xeon CPU Architecture. Many on the forum reported less than perfect behavior of Live Multi-Core capabilities on those machines investigate more. 2302 Euros vs 552 Euros it's a big difference for the entry levels.
Post the specs of the Macbook Pro and we could help more.