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MacBook Pro or Mac Mini as music server

Currently have apple extreme server. Also using the Olive Media Olive 4HD and Olive 2.
Thinking of adding either the latest Macbook pro or the mac mini as a music server for my cd collection.
Which of the two would be better suited to my task ?
I'm leaning towards the macbook pro 13" with 2.3 GHZ but then at almost half the price the Macbook min 2.4 is a steel but i wouldhave to add keyboard, a monitor and a mouse so cost would be close to the macbook pro.
Anything else am missing here ?
For the Dac, i plan to use either an I-Nova or a Bel canto designs dac 2.5. An esoteric D-07 is also not far fetch.
Would greatly appreciate some advice as i'm just starting out on this hobby (computer audio) just now.
Thanks guys-
nolitan

Showing 4 responses by rbstehno

rbstehno
1,401 posts
 
you don't need a monitor for the mini. mine is headless and i use my ipad or iphone to vnc into it or i use screen sharing from my other macs to install or do maintenance on it like updating Pure Music.
rbstehno
1,401 posts
 
if you are setting up a music server, you will need 2 large drives. i have 2 external 2TB disks linked to my mac mini using firewire. also, when you rip cd's to this server, you need to use xld or max, much better than itunes. why 2 drives? because you will need a backup of the 1st drive. i actually use 3 disks. the 3rd disk is a copy of all my macs in the house including the music server. every qtr i back all the machines up to this disk, then store the disk in a vault so if something happens to my house (fire, etc...), i have all of my info on my 3rd disk.

also, you will not hear any difference in sound using ssd. i deal with ssd's everyday and they are mainly used for speed and you don't need this kind of speed for music. plus, the ssd drives for PC/macs are of the cheaper set.

i have setup pure music to play the song from memory so it takes a few seconds for pure music to load the song in memory before playing the song.
good luck
rbstehno
1,401 posts
 
if you have your mac go to sleep after a while, make sure you set "wake for network access" under system preferences/energy saver. because i use screen sharing from my imac to the mac mini, i also use the WakeOnLan program that points to all the ip addresses on your network so you can wake any 1 of them up.
rbstehno
1,401 posts
 
ssd is way overkill for a music server. right now, i'm using Pure Music and i have it setup to read the song into memory and then it plays the song from ddr. you can see the light go on for a couple of seconds then the song starts then the disk light goes off. i have 2-2TB disks attached to the mini (1 for backup) and if i swapped that out for ssd (2TB), it would be many $$$ and a waste. plus, the ssd's that you buy for pc's are the cheaper kind. as the dealer you buy it from if they over-provision the storage? a good ssd ($10k) will over-provision up to 50-100% for longevity. see if you buy a 128GB ssd and how much room is allocated to you out of that 128GB.
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