I am looking to purchase a new Intel Mac Mini. If I am running Finale 2008, VD2 and Garritan Sounds for full marching band scores (winds, pit, battery) will I have enough speed and memory to have playback? If not, how much memory and processor speed would I need? Thanks.

[quote author=J Mattson link=topic=2016.msg10219#msg10219 date=1190957674]

iMac would be better, but even then I would be surprised if the playback was smooth.�� The 7,200rpm drive in the iMac is not the magic piece of hardware needed to get over a performance threshold.�� They are still quite slow in the big picture compared to 10k Raptor drives, which are slow compared to SCSI, which are slow compared to SCSI RAID... it's still just a consumer level piece of hardware.�� It annoys me how Apple plays up the ";pro"; aspect of their hardware, but only offers 7,200rpm SATA drives in their Mac Pro.�� Ok, enough ranting about that...
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I have been thinking of getting a Mac Pro, and I was wondering about the hard drive issue. How much of a performance increase will I notice between a 10k SATA drive and SCSI?

I would avoid the Mini as well.  What's your budget?

The advantages of a mini are that it's small and runs OS X.  Nothing else. 

I highly doubt you'll be able to get playback with a full marching band score, even with 2 GB of RAM.  This is especially true if trying to do it in Finale instead of exporting a MIDI file into Logic or Cubase etc. (which is required to get the best possible realism anyways.) In order to get a full score recording, you might have to export it in chunks: just the winds, then the brass, etc.  Then mix those exported AIFs back together.  For me there's a [i]big[/i] difference between getting it to playback good enough to hear what you're writing, and getting it to play without skips and dropouts good enough to use as a soundtrack or demo.   

iMac would be better, but even then I would be surprised if the playback was smooth.  The 7,200rpm drive in the iMac is not the magic piece of hardware needed to get over a performance threshold.  They are still quite slow in the big picture compared to 10k Raptor drives, which are slow compared to SCSI, which are slow compared to SCSI RAID... it's still just a consumer level piece of hardware.  It annoys me how Apple plays up the ";pro"; aspect of their hardware, but only offers 7,200rpm SATA drives in their Mac Pro.  Ok, enough ranting about that...

So I guess what I'm saying is, the mini is probably OK for [i]writing[/i] music.  For making a recording with a full marching band, battery, and pit, I doubt many computers can pull that off without either breaking it down into sections, or spending a good chunk of cash.

The minis are at likely at the end of their product cycle (I'm kind of waiting for the discontinuing notice from Steve), but the current models really are pretty hefty.  Most of them blow my powerbook out of the water and it pretty comfortably handles VDL up to about a dozen staves of simultaneous stuff without hiccuping too much.

One word of contention is the fact that the minis have such puny graphics cards, you may see some decent performance hits when running everything at once.  That mainly has to do with the fact that the GPU will offload to the processor which is already chugging away at the samples.

I'm with Coach on this--you might want to look at the 20"; iMacs.  7200 RPM harddrives, decent graphics cards, and more options with ram will definitely see some performance gains in this price range.  They're still pretty reasonable, even with the 2gig ram addon. 

Mark-

If you have to choose between the two MINI models, I would choose the $799 model with 2GB Ram.  This is not going to have a 7200RPM Hard Drive though and that is what is really going to help you in addition to the RAM in processing these sounds.  If you are able to, I would look at something with a fast hard drive like the iMAC which has a 7200 RPM drive.  You can also get more than 2GB in the iMacs giving you a little bit more power, but really anything over 3 or 4GB isn't going to help you much more.