Well if you had done as i suggested, you would have read that the OP is asking about Mac Mini. I can’t imagine how you could have missed that but i guess you did. Hence, me saying re read it.
Yep, I had 64Gb on my i7 win 10 PC
I’ve now got 16GB on my M1 Pro CPU and everything runs 100 times better
If was buying now, I would get 32GB to future proof it. I’d only consider 64GB if I had a ton of disposable income, which I don’t.
Then again, I don’t use 100s of tracks. I suspect if I was constantly using a load of very large sample libraries, I might go even higher.
I’ve got a 1TB internal drive and 4TB external Thunderbolt 4 NVME, while I have 900GB free internal space (and have used 3.5TB on external) I still wouldn’t like to have less than 1TB. I know that sounds a little stupid considering how much free internal space I have, but I like the extra just in case
I want to see someone put the base mini to the test with real-world sessions. M4 / 16GB RAM. (External storage is allowed)
The base M4? For music production? Don’t bother. Go for the M4Pro instead.
If the base M4 can edit 4K multi cam footage, you can be sure it can handle audio just fine. But up until what point, is the question I want to know.
I’d bet good money that the performance difference will make no noticeable difference for 99% of the time.
Yes, a good CPU is important, but the “plain” M4 is plenty fast already.
If you sit there with a stopwatch and measure every fraction of a second, ok you will sometimes measure a small difference, but at the end of the day, no real human perceivable difference in what you will accomplish in a day.
Doubling the SSD read speed will make a difference. (boot/loading time mostly)
Having a 400HP engine under the hood instead of “only” 350HP makes no (real) difference in everyday life.
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The point is the M4Pro is a better value for someone using a Macmini for music production in a studio. The base M4 makes more sense in a laptop. It was the same thing with the M2/M2Pro Macmini.
That’s a pretty broad stroke to paint. You don’t know two important factors which can vary wildly:
A. What production workflow someone is using. ie. leaning audio vs low latency VSTi
B. Studio budget. There’s an $800 gap between a base M4 mini and the M4 Pro mini.
It’s only a $400 gap for comparable memory/storage. The base M4 Macmini is great if you primarily use your Macmini for email and web browsing and a lot of Macmini owners only use it for that purpose. For use in a music studio though? The Pro upgrade is almost always the better value for that use case. In fact the studio use case is the very reason the Pro option exists.
If you’re in a position to say $400 USD is “only” $400, then by all means go for it, I would! But it would still be an overkill…
The question of this OP was “how much to spend and on what?!”
Does not quite sound like “money-is-no-object”.
I’m all in favor of picking a good CPU, but going for the Pro flavor would be the bottom of my list in this present case.
The M4 (non-Pro) is already a jump ahead of either the fastest M2Pro or M3 MacBooks and 1000s of users are quite satisfied today with these machines.
Going for the M4Pro is just like adding a few more HPs to your Porsche 911.
Nice? Yes!
Required? No.
[ Amusing how we argue on details here while the OP seems indifferent to any of it. ]
Haha! OP is back!
Thanks very much for everyone’s contributions, it’s really appreciated!
It does ultimately come down to budget,
I would like this Mac to do me for some time, so I feel that future proofing is a sensible approach,
So the answer to what should I spend money on is probably everything!
I do sometimes create large orchestral projects so I need a capable set up.
A sweet spot would be 12 core m4 pro but I would worry about only 24gb ram… so 48 gb is probably sensible.
So yeah., I’ll prob push the boat out and shell out £1799 ( that UK pounds not dollars for you US folks- much more expensive for us, you lucky sods!)
Will eventually sell my i7 iMac so that will fund a decent chunk of it.
Thanks again everyone! 
I think you misunderstood. By “only” I was saying the difference is $400, not $800.
The OP asked what upgrades from the base are worth considering. For music production, I would recommend the Pro cpu upgrade.