Cubase 14 pro on 2024 Mac mini M4 Base model

Cubase
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I thought I would say hi so, Hi!

I have questions about running Cubase 14 pro on the 2024 M4 base model, 256Gb & 16Gb. I have a budget & now the the base model has dropped to $499 I figure it just time to shelf Cakewalk & Sonar X2 producer. Sometimes you just have to face it as finding support for it is basically non existent today for the old paid versions before Gibson got its hands on it & destroyed it. And as much I would love to buy a pro or studio version and 24 or 32Gb of ram and 512Gb of space, unfortunately itā€™s just not in my budget.

I mean I came up thru it CW for decades from Cakewalk 2.1 in the 80ā€™s to Pro9 in the 90ā€™s to Sonar x2 producer from about 2005 to today. And I know it inside & out. But now that I donā€™t do anywhere near the amount of work I used to do anymore. Heck about all I do now is usually just me, or me & my neighbor and from time to time our old band will sit down as well. And even thats difficult since losing our bass player last year and our drummer heck I can replace him with MIDI drums so I think he just shows up for inclusion.And every once in awhile Iā€™ll make some simple videos to go along with it.

As far as hardware goes I still run an ancient Yamaha AW4416 workstation with 16 dedicated optical outs as the centerpiece and an RME RayDat (mother & daughter cards) on PCIe. And still use most my old rack mounted stuff I had for what seems forever. But beyond that Iā€™m kind of at a point in life where my wife & I are downsizing and rather than lugging all of that stuff around? Seems everyone has gone the USB route nowadays, smaller footprints and so on & so forthā€¦

So from that is why I am thinking about picking up one of the new M4 miniā€™s base models. Heck, add a Focusrite 18i20 or 18i16 and I would imagine the stock Mac mini M4 base would do at least 6 or 8 channels at once. Or at least thats my thinking anyway. All of the videos Iā€™ve watched and reading up on Iā€™ve done on this? I donā€™t really hear anyone complaining about it, if they are complaining, they sure have a good way of NOT saying other wise.

Probably the biggest reason I went to Cubase 14-pro was more or less the interface, it seemed more like what I am used to working with. Whereas when I look at logic, it looks to cartoonishy to me & have run it on another friends Mac and really didnā€™t care for the lack of certain things, or that I couldnā€™t find them easily anyway. It reminds me more of Garage band on steroids or something more like what an untrained ear would work with.

As of right now I have an older Asus G74SX-BB9 which is now 2.5Tb & 16Gb DDR5 ram and an i7 and a dedicated graphics processor and was going to use one of the liscense slots and install pro14 on that to see how it goes. The machine itself is almost 15 years old. But just did a clean install of windows 10. And I also have an aging Dell i7 XPS 8Tb & 32Gb ram which is maxed out but not very mobile & that is now nearing 10 years old as well and started as a new win 7 machine and auto upgraded to 10 but is in dire need of a fresh clean installation of 10. So I do have two other machines at my disposal. And in the same token I am just growing tired of Windows changing their architecture every 7 years and having everyone constantly retooling their stuff. Heck I remember when everything went from 32bit to 64bit architecture and lack of support idled 3 of my 60ā€ printers in one fell swoop, and turned into $15k worth printers into doorstops.

Well, anyway, my intention was to put one license slot on the Asus laptop & the other slot to the Mac Mini M4 and just use an external SSD or NVMie drive to ferry small jobs between the 2.

I know off the bat I do have a few simple questions about Cubasis V. Soanr:

  1. Can I Save working files to a specific location off the installation from Pro14?

  2. If yes, will I be able to do iterative saves along the way?

  3. Can Pro-14 export an entire job as a bundle to an exterior SSD or NVMIE driveā€¦ and import from that drive (or vice/versa), after recording in one space on a Mac but when I get down to mixing importing the bundle in a Windows machine?

  4. I know 256gb is small and wish I could afford the 512 but it is what it is, so am I even looking at this in the correct light? Or am I just heading for a headache & heartbreak..

Anyone have any thought about doing this or what to expect? Hey Iā€™m all ears. Good or bad, Iā€™d like to hear your thoughts on this.

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I too come from CW since the 80ā€™sā€¦ They killed it a few months after they convinced me to spend 100ā€™s of $ for a ā€œlifetimeā€ licenseā€¦ a short ā€œlifetimeā€ that was!

That same day, I made sure I saved .wav and .mid files for everything I needed from CW and I removed it completely from my PC and restarted fresh with Cubase. Not the smartest reaction (lost some stuff out of anger), but no regrets about the move to CB.

Iā€™m sure you will enjoy this M4 for CB and it should do all you need just fine. Although 16GB seems a little short if you get tempted to use large libraries, I wouldnā€™t worry too much if using fast NVMe drives for those. I put large libraries on an external TB4 Samsung drive and it works fine. If you get crazy on the number of tracks or layers, you might have to freeze (or render) the tracks youā€™re not actively working on, but thatā€™s very easy in CB.

Also no problem moving projects between machines, esp. if you go with CB15 (not 14) that recently improved on this.

Now I understand (share!) your frustrations about Windows, but do not expect MacOS to be frustration-free! You will have brand new problems so they might feel less frustrating for a while, so it might be worth the trouble for you to learn a new environment, and yes, the M4 is really a great value.

Short answer: I donā€™t see any showstopper in this plan - have fun and let us know.

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Iā€™ve been preparing to move back to Mac since the M1 with 8Gb ram came out & I havenā€™t bought the base M4 yet. Was just kinda waiting until the weekend to see what input I would see here, hands-on.

In the few years Iā€™ve had the M1, it really hasnā€™t balked at anything Iā€™ve thrown at it. I also do a lot of digital painting, photo editing and videos, and that can be somewhat power hungry & ran GarageBand on it just for run a few times with an old Focusrite 6i6 I have thatā€™s been laying around forever, while it hasnā€™t really balked at that either but thats nothing like Sonar or Cubase.

I thought about pro-logic as well but after running it a few times on someone elseā€™s laptop, I really really didnā€™t care for its workflow. And thats when I started reading around and found out that Cubase was designed at Mac Silicone & logic always seem to have more complaints than praise and wound up going with Cubase Pro.

Heck even most of all the benchmarks Iā€™ve seen almost all of them were on-par with logic or higher than logic. Iā€™ve got one license on my ancient i7 laptop (ASUS G74sx) it runs it wonderfully despite it being a 15 year old machine, but I just did a fresh clean install and sew SSDā€™s and took it to 2.5Tb on board with 16gb ram (32 would be max but canā€™t justify it on a 15+ year old machine). SO I might as well put the 2nd license somewhere and the Base Model M4 mini just sounds like a really good match for Cubase 14pro.

So based on that (and the endless reading) I just figure the Base M4 & 16Gb ram has got to be able to do it within reason.

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The base M4 is an incredible bargain. For $499 you get close to the best single core performance in the history of personal computers.

Sample-based VIs are pretty good these days at streaming from a good external ssd, so 16GB will be plenty for most people.

I know it seems too good to be true, but the game has changed in the past couple years for the compute power you can get for music production for very little money.

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This. Trick is to set sample preload low.

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Iā€™ve never been a big fan of sample based songs.

99.9% Iā€˜m just recording analog instruments. Iā€™ve never been a big fan of throwing things into a song that canā€™t be done live. About as fancy as I go I might isolate & trim out a cymbal or guitar tidbit and play it backwards.

Other than that, about the only other things I use are a few VSTā€™s for fancy reverbs, EQā€™ing, De-essers etcā€¦

Probably the biggest thing Iā€™ll probably have a hard time dealing with is getting accustomed of going from an ADAT based setup & being thrown in the USB driven realm