How quiet is a mini mac?

Posted by: Occean on 01 June 2009

I am looking at getting rid of my Sonos in place of a PC/Mac.

The Sonos is great, but I have found 90% of the time I am using it via my PC...so I may as well ditch the Sonos and use a PC/Mac.

I know I can easily build a quiet PC, but I am very tempted by a mini mac as it seem to fit the bill nicely, but I am curious how quiet are they?

Posted on: 01 June 2009 by QTT

As the owner of a core 2 duo Mac Mini, I would say that it is very quiet and it does the job exactly as I would expect it to do.

The Mac Mini is sitting on a Fraim with an external 1000 GB disk on the floor. I use it with a Transporter. The sound is very sweet and detailed.

Posted on: 01 June 2009 by garyi

The mini for the most part is no more noisy than the transformers of the hifi.

Posted on: 01 June 2009 by pcstockton

I have heard a few, and really paid attention to how loud they were.

Depending on whats going on they can be far from silent.

When the CD-ROM drive is running, it is comparable to any other Mac or PC you have experienced.

When the Hard Drive is accessing things, it is quiet but not silent. Typical tick-tick of the drive. Not as loud as a shit drive, but you can hear it working.

When idle, yet powered up, it is as silent as any Mac.

Overall, for a stock computer, they are as quiet as they come. Unfortunately with the Mac you cannot easily upgrade or modify anything to make further reductions in operating noise.

My dedicated music PC was as loud as any standard Dell before I changed a few components, i.e. internal hard drive, and CPU fan. Now with dead silent Seagates and a nearly silent fan, it is surely much quieter than my cable box.

I had upgraded the videocard at some point, but put the stock card back in because i no longer had any use for an accelerated card. Although the trick card was liquid cooled and quiet as a mouse, I elected to go back to the stock card for CPU usage reasons. Not sure it makes a difference or not.

-patrick

Posted on: 01 June 2009 by james n

I run a 2008 vintage mini and it sits in my isoblue rack. My 250 makes more noise - apart from when it wakes up or is ripping a CD i don't here it.

James

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by Occean

Cheers I think this may be the way to go.

Just need to make sure I am 100% happy with the software I will be using. So far thats the main draw back for the switch form sonos to desktop, the Sonos software is really quite good!

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by james n

So is the iPod touch controlling iTunes - very slick and smaller than the Sonos controller

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by Occean

quote:
Originally posted by james n:
So is the iPod touch controlling iTunes - very slick and smaller than the Sonos controller

I was looking at running windows on my mac - I have not been converted to OSX yet! And my collection is 100% FLAC!

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by pcstockton

quote:
Originally posted by Occean:

I was looking at running windows on my mac - I have not been converted to OSX yet! And my collection is 100% FLAC!

I tried and tried and tried Mac/FLAC/Boot camp etc........ dont bother. Waste of time.

If you want to email me off site, feel free.

If you want to use your iPhone as a remote for your music player, there are WAAAAAAY better options.

Mac's are great, for something, I personally dont know what yet.... but NOT the way to go for a music server, IMEO.

iPhone? BEST DEVICE EVER.

Or,
You can convert everything to WAV or ALAC. Then use iTunes/Mac. There are many easy programs that will batch convert everything to ALAC or WAV into the original or new folders of your naming scheme (this of course requires correct tagging).

Of course you need to know that iTunes has some serious issues with a large library and long playlists. Which I personally use. It allows for ZERO customization, and is a complete resource hog. With the iTunes store embedded in the software, Mac genius what-not, I just find it offensive.

It is great for syncing your iPhone with Outlook though

-Patrick

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by garyi

Once you have learnt the basics of itunes like for instance turning genius off these problems tend to go away.

Sadly macs appear to not be good for anything, which is a real shame as I have so many of them doing nothing.

Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by ferenc

quote:
Originally posted by pcstockton:
quote:
Originally posted by Occean:

I was looking at running windows on my mac - I have not been converted to OSX yet! And my collection is 100% FLAC!

....
Of course you need to know that iTunes has some serious issues with a large library and long playlists. Which I personally use. It allows for ZERO customization, and is a complete resource hog.
-Patrick

Hi Patrick,

I do not know what you consider large library, now I have something like 8 TB of music (using 44.1k, 48k, 88.2, 176.4 and 192k sample rate recordings and LPs digitized), completely mirrored on my MacPro' external FW and SCSI drives, it means some 180.000 tracks and I have no problem at all using it.

I even can use this iTunes music library on my Macbook with only 1 GB RAM, the media drives are mounted through simple Cat5e, GigE network. No problem at all. Works like charm, remote controlled with an iPhone. I do not feel it makes any of the MacPro (6 GB RAM) or MacBook (1 TB RAM) systems slow. I am using iTunes since early 2004, so I somehow grown to the computer audio with the different iTunes versions

. It can handle when my wife's MacBook, my son's MacBook Pro is connected also, through simple iTunes sharing to other rooms. It is so convenient and easy to use by my family members, I am happy with it.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by Naijeru

quote:
Originally posted by Occean:
I was looking at running windows on my mac - I have not been converted to OSX yet! And my collection is 100% FLAC!

Hmm, I know Parallels is a fantastic Windows emulator, but I have no idea how suitable it is for media purposes on a Mini (I run it on a Mac Pro).

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by garyi

One thing I would say is its a bit silly purchasing apple hardware to run windows, I am sure there are plenty of small factor PCs whcih have been designed with windows in mind.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by pcstockton

quote:
Originally posted by ferenc:
I do not know what you consider large library, now I have something like 8 TB of music (using 44.1k, 48k, 88.2, 176.4 and 192k sample rate recordings and LPs digitized),

You can load all your music into a single playlist?

Or even, keep all of your music in individual playlists?

If so, what am I doing wrong? I couldn't get 25% of my playlist without it taking about 5minutes for iTunes to open and be ready to play.

I like to keep ALL of my music in a single playlist. Then I navigate/search through it for whatever I want. Also I enjoy putting the entire archive on random until something strikes my fancy.

Of course I can always easily create other (smaller), artist/genre specific playlists. But the main playlist with ALL of my music (90K songs) is a must.

Foobar is the ONLY player that can handle this size of playlist. And it does it without ANY lag or ANY issues whatsoever. Lickity split.

For my PC I have tried iTunes, VLC, Sonos, Squeezebox player, WinAmp, JR River, WMP, adn a few less well known. For my Mac, of course converting to ALAC first, I tried iTunes, Play, Cog, VLC, MacAmp, and a few (now) non-existent players.

None of them come anywhere close to Foobar. And Foobar will NOT run on any method of a Mac running Windows. I have tried it, my Mac expert friend tried it. We tried it at a Apple service location. Never worked once. Never. Same goes for EAC.

After that I gave up on using my Mac and concentrated on using a different method to incorporate my iPhone into my music listening with Macs or iTunes.

If you can show me what I might have been doing wrong I would really appreciate it.

thanks
Patrick

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by garyi

The only real difference I can think is your running itunes on windows?

I have a limited library by comparison here about 16,000 tunes it loads in about 3 seconds on my mac.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by QTT

PC actually said that he used iTunes on his Mac. This is strange because iTunes is very speedy on my Mac and also on my Dell XPS. I have around 1,500 CDs, all ripped using Apple Lossless. The one on my PC is a duplicate what I have on my Mac.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by pcstockton

Garyi,

Firstly, I was asking Ferenc about how he loads a 180,000 song playlist.

Secondly, I have a Mac and have used a Mac for this. No different than PC version as far as this is concerned.

Garyi, how big is your largest playlist, and also library?

Allegedly a 32,000 song library was the limit previous to iTunes 4. But I surely couldn't get anything bigger than this to work with iTunes 8! On either a Mac or a PC.

thanks again,
Patrick

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by pcstockton

Are you guys making a distinction between the Library, and a Playlist? Or are they one and the same for iTunes (cant remember).

All i know is that the Macbook has plenty of balls (2gb RAM), and the PC is even higher specd.

It is the loading of a 80K song playlist that iTunes runs into problems for me.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by Guido Fawkes

Please could you guys speak up a bit as I can't hear you over the noise my PowerMac is making? Thanks

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by QTT

The music library is the universe and a playlist is just a subset of the library.
I have never had more than 20,000 songs so I guess that I have never hit the performance limit of iTunes.

Can you use smart playlist to reduce the size of your playlist?

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by ferenc

quote:
Originally posted by pcstockton:
quote:
Originally posted by ferenc:
I do not know what you consider large library, now I have something like 8 TB of music (using 44.1k, 48k, 88.2, 176.4 and 192k sample rate recordings and LPs digitized),

You can load all your music into a single playlist?

Or even, keep all of your music in individual playlists?

If so, what am I doing wrong? I couldn't get 25% of my playlist without it taking about 5minutes for iTunes to open and be ready to play.

I like to keep ALL of my music in a single playlist. Then I navigate/search through it for whatever I want. Also I enjoy putting the entire archive on random until something strikes my fancy.

Of course I can always easily create other (smaller), artist/genre specific playlists. But the main playlist with ALL of my music (90K songs) is a must.

Foobar is the ONLY player that can handle this size of playlist. And it does it without ANY lag or ANY issues whatsoever. Lickity split.

For my PC I have tried iTunes, VLC, Sonos, Squeezebox player, WinAmp, JR River, WMP, adn a few less well known. For my Mac, of course converting to ALAC first, I tried iTunes, Play, Cog, VLC, MacAmp, and a few (now) non-existent players.

None of them come anywhere close to Foobar. And Foobar will NOT run on any method of a Mac running Windows. I have tried it, my Mac expert friend tried it. We tried it at a Apple service location. Never worked once. Never. Same goes for EAC.

After that I gave up on using my Mac and concentrated on using a different method to incorporate my iPhone into my music listening with Macs or iTunes.

If you can show me what I might have been doing wrong I would really appreciate it.

thanks
Patrick

Hi Patrick,

To be honest I see no reason to keep all my songs in one playlist in iTunes. You can search the whole library in the library search window easily practically in real-time, without waiting for the result even in case of my large track count. To use the browser window in the music library showing all genres, all artists and all albums, gives you exactly the same result as putting all your music in one playlist if I understood well your method.

Just to check your experience, I generated a smart playlist with all my 44k sample rate songs added between 2006 and 2008. This playlist has 72921 songs (233,8 days, 1939 GB). I can search it, list it in real-time, without being sluggish any way. I can step from one playlist to the next in real-time without any waiting. Then I added the 96k sample rate songs to make the smart playlist bigger, now it has 91233 songs and no problem to use this playlist or any of my other playlists. So my quad MacPro with 6 GB RAM can deal with it flawlessly. If you want I can try the same big playlists on my old MacBoook with 1 GB RAM sometime tomorrow.

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by pcstockton

quote:
Originally posted by ferenc:
So my quad MacPro with 6 GB RAM can deal with it flawlessly. If you want I can try the same big playlists on my old MacBoook with 1 GB RAM sometime tomorrow.

Whoa.... maybe that is the issue. 6gb of RAM?

If you would be willing to try it on a your MacBook, that would be really, really cool.

And yes, you might not want it all your music in one playlist, and cannot see a reason to, but this is crucial for me. It isn't so much as being able to "see" them. I can just bring up the folders if I want to do that. I like everything at my fingertips in one list. When going random I want every song to have equal chance of getting pulled up.

So is there a difference between a playlist and the library?

Thanks for the help!
-Patrick

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by james n

quote:
Please could you guys speak up a bit as I can't hear you over the noise my PowerMac is making? Thanks

Are you sure you can hear it over the crackle from those old vinyl records...

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by garyi

PC, define playlist? Are these ones you have created from scratch or smart playlists? In either case for me they are fine.

All I can think of is that you are using super large images for artwork? (mine are no more than 500 pixels)

Posted on: 02 June 2009 by ferenc

quote:
Originally posted by pcstockton:
quote:
Originally posted by ferenc:
So my quad MacPro with 6 GB RAM can deal with it flawlessly. If you want I can try the same big playlists on my old MacBoook with 1 GB RAM sometime tomorrow.

Whoa.... maybe that is the issue. 6gb of RAM?

If you would be willing to try it on a your MacBook, that would be really, really cool.

And yes, you might not want it all your music in one playlist, and cannot see a reason to, but this is crucial for me. It isn't so much as being able to "see" them. I can just bring up the folders if I want to do that. I like everything at my fingertips in one list. When going random I want every song to have equal chance of getting pulled up.

So is there a difference between a playlist and the library?

Thanks for the help!
-Patrick

When all the tracks of the library in the playlist, theoretically there is no difference between playlist and library. You even can setup the view showing the same metadata. As it was said earlier, playlist is alwys the subset of the library. The items in the playlist only pointers, not real items, as you surely know. As I see you can do all the same things in the music library through the browser as you can do in the playlist. I used to use the list view in the the browser, generally I am not interested in the covers, covers are shown only when I am using Front Row. I will check the big playlist at night when I am at home again with the lowly MacBook. I did not experience any difference in the responsiveness between the MacPro and MacBook but will check it again for you.

Posted on: 03 June 2009 by ferenc

Hi Patrick,

tonight I generated a big 80k track playlist on my MacBook with 1 GB ram. To make it more difficult the tracks were stored on my server and the MacBook's music library is located on the network and the media drives are mounted through GigE network, not locally.

I had no difficulties to search, play any item, even while I was simultaneously playing 192k/24 bit tracks through the same network.

Then I mounted the drives using USB2 locally and tried to use the same 80k item playlist, no problem again.

So I could not regenerate your problem with iTunes.