Mac minis

[Beechwoods]

If you use firewire to connect it will even make the backup a bootable drive if the mini ever fails. Perfect solution for my needs. YMMV

Both my machines boot from USB as well. It's a while since Apple removed the 'Firewire only' requirement on boot drives - since they removed Firewire ports from most of their consumer laptops strangely enough

[webby]

I've had no problems at all with Lion. To be honest, I was surprised at how smooth the upgrades were. I did one machine from Snow Leopard to Lion, and another a clean install onto a wiped drive for my laptop that had been running Leopard. Used Migration Assistant to restore all my user data and configuration from my Time Machine backup.

Only thing to bear in mind is that Lion is the first OSX version to cease support for PowerPC applications (no Rosetta), so it's worth checking if you rely on any PowerPC only apps. Bearing in mind it was about 2006 that Apple moved to Intel, most developers will now have upgraded their stuff to Universal Binaries at least, if not Intel only anyway. I had to upgrade Graphics Converter, but that was it Painless

If you're using ms office for mac 2008, it will work fine in lion, but, if you need to reinstall it or install it on another mac, it won't work because the installer is a PPC app! Office 2004 is totally PPC, and 2011 is intel.

Apparently some of the adobe apps have a problem with lion.

[Beechwoods]

That's hilarious! Good old Microsoft Office!

[Alan]

I'm using a mini 3.1, which is 2009 with the 2.27 core 2 duo processor. I store my music as AIFF on a NAS which I like to hook up over ethernet. Playback is through Decibel. I have 8gb of RAM waiting to be installed and I need to get an SSD, probably from OCZ. All this goes through a Young DAC over async USB.

I have to say I am very pleased with my mini, and on sound quality terms I wholeheartedly recommend it highly. Be warned though, they are not really a plug and play solution, as optimising them takes fiddling, there are periodic updates, and a myriad of options on everything from hardware upgrades and music players to ripping software and what format to play - lets not forget backups for your precious files.

Having said that, I sold my Pioneer stable platter transport as it could not compete, poor thing.

The mini itself is great, runs silent and cool and uses almost no energy. One thing though, theres no need to leave it on 24/7, as it can be put to sleep instantly and it wakes instantly too. You just need to go through finder to find the external drive again. The Snow Leopard OS was so stable I never switched the mini off for 6 months.

There are conflicting reports about Lion on Computer Audiophile, many say its great, others feel differently. It does seem to be system resource hungry as Windows 7 is, but whether that matters is another discussion. I have stuck with SL for then short term.

The main drawback with the mini and similar solutions is they are designed to do so many things, ie they are full computers. While its great to have a computer with the tv as monitor, and a lovely aluminium bluetooth keyboard and glass topped mouse, this is all icing on the cake. Id like to see a simpler pared down music (perhaps dvd also) only solution that just does what I want without all the tweakery and optimisation. They might not sell many, but there would ba an audio market. It would need to be relly to get folks away from their minis though.

[Werner Berghofer]

Alan,

They might not sell many

since their first introduction the various Mac mini systems have sold better than sliced bread.

Werner.

[Alan]

Bread isnt much good at playing music though, is it?

my apologies Werner, I kmow as you do the McMini has sold well, it is the pared down music server I would like to see bought to market that wouldnt sell well, partly because it need to be very good to get us away from our minis.

[Werner Berghofer]

Alan,

Bread isnt much good at playing music though, is it?

yes, now I see :-) My apologies for replying like a complete idiot.

Werner.

[dave2010]

Money must be burning a hole in my pocket. Older Mac minis (even G4 ones) still seem to fetch quite a high price on eBay, considering. Last year's model, with the DVD/CD drive seems reasonable enough at the cheapish price already pointed out, but against that the latest model does seem to be much more powerful.

As far as I can see, a fully specced Mac Mini (i7, plus all the extras - 8Gbyte etc.) wouldn't cost much more than £1k, and even with a slightly lower clock speed than my iMac, should actually be more powerful. My iMac is an Intel Core Duo - it does most things very well, apart from playback of some high resolution video taken on our cameras. [I found a fix though, which is to recode the videos using handbrake, and the stuttering vanishes ....]

With the HDMI outputs on the new and previous models, it should be possible to drive TVs with files fed from a server via my LAN, and this could be an attractive option. I'm guessing that the TV could function as a display for control and setup purposes, or maybe the Mac minis can be controlled from other machines on the network. However that's done, use of such should give much snappier results for iPlayer than some of the interfaces via Freesat, Blu Ray or DVD players surely?

Having said that, for occasional use, would a Macbook Air also serve a similar purpose, or is the Air so much less powerful that it wouldn't be up to the job?
Obviously the Air would be much less likely to be left in a system, as intended for mobile use, but could be used to drive an audio or video system occasionally. Presumably an Air can play back videos and audio material without too many problems.

I fear I am tempted to buy one of each. I won't even mention the new Macbook Pros (other than this) in this post.

[allsorts]

Alan, have you deleted any applications or turned off spotlight etc to put the OS on a diet? I've tried to reduce Snow leopard on my 2.26Mini as much as i can and use Aurdivana in a hog mode with most of my 8gb ram allocated to it. This has really improved the sound quality for me. I stopped upgrading itunes at V9.something. Upgrades seem more to do with apple making money from its store and selling ipads/iphone apps than improving sound quality. I've stopped at 10.6.6 because i couldn't see any purpose in a bloated 477mb upgrade that basically was about getting it ready for Lion. Happy with what i have and getting more listening time.

[Alan]

Hi Greg,

I did scour Computer Audiophile one time & collect all the tips I could for trimming Snow Leopard down - I can't quite remember what I did now, but spotlight is certainly off.

I have 8GB RAM to go in, I will get a small SSD as well shortly - perhaps when I move I'll get my 'MAC mate' to fit it all & do a fresh install. I can then carefully go through it again to make sure I get it right.

I didn't delete any applications yet as I still use the browser etc to watch uTube etc on the TV.

I also love hog made (in Decibel, though I must admit the later versions of Audirvana sounded equally good to me), but my DAC wont let me take advantage of Integer output.