Patrick in Denver Colorado about 30 miles which is East I think it's east of here not my I don't know I get on the freeway hit go and and off we go to Denver um I have a 2011 Mac Mini that I've been

waiting to update so I can use Apple Music Apple just announced new Mac minis with M2 chips what are your recommendations regarding which model to purchase as an audio server which chipset which RAM internal hard drive size etc I plan to use this as an audio

server only thanks for all you do for us well I'll give you a couple answers first off I still have a couple of Mac minis around that we use for servers there's one upstairs that I on occasion use and I've actually over the years had

multiple Mac Minis and my friend Bill used to build a real hot rod Mac Mini that clearly sounded better than the Mac minis I have up there okay that said and I'll explain the differences in a sec that said if you're not a crazy man like me then

it probably doesn't matter and any standard Mac Mini with a decent hard drive that you can load up a bunch of tracks is probably going to be just fine and before we get into the details let me just explain the one thing you don't want to do

Macs and Windows all have their own audio engines I you know I it's they're processing units for audio and you know most people that play audio on a computer don't really care they just want it to work so if if you put in one sample rate they

want it to have a consistent output of quality audio, as best as it's going to get, and they don't want to fuss with it. Well, that doesn't sound like us. We're audiophiles. We got to fuss with everything, right? So those Core Audio

processing units in the Mac and in the Windows need to be skirted around. You don't want to use that. Do not put your audio through the audio processing that is standard within the mini or the any Mac system or any Windows system. Don't do it. Everything

comes out at the same sample rate. It's, you know, it's, it's like, ah, here I'm probably going to get in trouble, you know. It's, it's like a McDonald's milkshake. You know, they all kind of taste the same. It's good for a whole bunch of people,

but if you're into milkshakes, I'm not. I'm just thinking that this is probably accurate because, you know, McDonald's is famous for making everything sort of good and nothing great and nothing bad, right? So it's kind of the the McDonald's

of audio for computers. I'm probably going to get all kinds of hate mail. God, I haven't eaten at McDonald's in so long. Thank goodness. I gave up all that fast food junk. So bad for you. Okay, we got off on the fast food. We don't

want to get off into that. Skip the core engine. Now, how do you do that? Well, you need a program. So, in with Mac, you could use Audirvana. It's a really good program. It circumvents that whole engine. You could use Bit Perfect. You could, in a Windows machine, you can

Oh gosh, what is it? Just just look. I I don't use Windows a whole lot. On the Pyramid system at Octave Records, that's all I use, but that's a pretty fancy system. Of course, it doesn't use that, but there's there's

all kinds of programs you can buy that sets it separate and you'll know it sets it separate with a real easy test. You want to be able to go into your DAC to play any sample rate source file and have it come out the same sample rate on

your DAC. So if you were to take a standard Mac Mini and you played, let's say, a 192 kilohertz 24 bit piece of music on that Mac, when you look on your DAC, it needs to say 192.24. Now if you go into the core engine on

the Mac, you can set the sample rate and bit depth anywhere you want. So let's say you set it for 192.24, well then everything you play from a 44.1 to a 352 to a 176 will always come out 192.24.

That is this upsampling, downsampling device that they use. You don't want that. So just if you're playing 44.1, it needs to come out at that sample rate, that bit depth, and once you accomplish that, you've got 90% of it under

control. All right, this is probably going longer than I wanted. Bill used to build Mac Minis for me, and there he disabled everything on the Mac Mini. Just I don't even know how he did it. He just he took out all the standard stuff, the file browser. All he

got rid of all of it, put as much RAM as he possibly could into the thing and ran it as bare bones as possible and it did sound better. And I think we always use bit perfect for those so all right, there you go. Hope that helps, have fun and let me know how

it turns out all right. Thanks. Bye. [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Building a Mac Mini music server

Building a Mac Mini music server

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