What is the best Mac computer for music production? Macbook pro or macbook air for music production? In this video I'll take a look at ALL Mac computers avai. IMac Pro – Best Mac For Music Production in 2018 Apple sets new standards with the iMac Pro – at least as far as performance is concerned. The iMac Pro is prepared for extensive audio projects, music video editing in 4K and 8K, for complex 3D rendering and the creation of VR simulations.

1. Which Mac Laptop Is Best For Music Production
2. Which Mac To Buy For Music Production
3. Free Music Download For Macbook
4. Which Mac For Music Production
5. Which Mac Is Best For Music Production

Mac Tips

Mac TipsUpdated: October 22, 2020 | 11 min read

Music-making does not require renting studios to record your tracks—all you need is your home laptop to apply the desired effects to polish tracks. But before this, learn which Apple computers are the best ones to record music.

Musicians prefer Macs, and for several reasons—high-quality music production is one of them. In this article, we’ll cover the main aspects you should consider when choosing the best Mac for music production and give our recommendations on important models specs.

Which Mac Laptop Is Best For Music Production

In a nutshell, we believe the top three of the best Macs for music production 2020 are:

• 27-inch 5K iMac—the best choice for music production
• 16-inch MacBook Pro—the best portable laptop
• Mac mini—the best budget Mac

Read further to find out why these models are the best computers for creating music!

What’s Best for Musicians—Mac or PC?

Choosing between macOS and a Windows platform depends mostly on your computer preferences and your collaborators. With the fast development of technology, the PC is right behind Mac. However, it's easier to get started making music on a Mac than on a PC. We’ll tell you why.

The PC standard audio drivers won’t be suitable for creating music professionally. Windows users would need to install ASIO drivers for the sound card alongside other music hardware they’d like to use, for example, MIDI controllers. Windows does not provide native music software—that’s why installing extra music software is essential.

On a Mac, on the contrary, fewer steps are required. You can plug in music hardware and then open GarageBand—the pre-installed app on iOS and macOS in DAW (digital audio workstation). It lets you have your music studio for recording, editing, composing, and experimenting with audio-tracks. We’ll tell you more about GarageBand in this article.

Recommended system requirements

The Mac’s system requirements depend on which type of music software you’d be using and the complexity of your music-making processes. The next step is to check the program’s official system requirements you will run. This will help you determine the minimum required specs your Mac should have.

For music production, a Mac should have at least a 2.2Ghz i7 quad-core processor. The process determines how fast your music projects would run (and usually they are huge). Start at least with 16GB of RAM. Having less than 16 GB of RAM means using fewer instrument voices. Also, your speed will decrease.

Let’s talk about storage. The amount of disk space depends on the size of the audio files you’ll be working on. As a rule, professional software can use hundreds of GBs. So, for starters, Macs coming with basic 256GB SSDs may be enough. Still, you can plan to add some external storage for your Mac in the future.

Video cards have always been important for playing games and video editing. And for audio software as well. Choose a video card wisely— check which one is required by the audio software you need and if you’ll have to connect any displays.

The Best Macs for Music Production

Here is our list of the best Macs for music-making:

27-inch 5K iMac—the best choice for music production

The new 2019 hardware makes the 27-inch 5K iMac our top pick for your home studio. You can customize its RAM up to 64GB. The advanced processor lets you use all the features of pro audio editing apps. The size of the Retina display is an obvious benefit. Besides, it comes with four USB 3 ports alongside with two Thunderbolt 3/USB Type C ports.

16-inch MacBook Pro—the best portable laptop

If you go on tours—the 16-inch MacBook Pro is just right for you! The basic configuration makes it powerful enough. Using the Touch Bar is useful when you record tracks and change the settings at once. Only 4.3 pounds (2.0 kg) of weight, MacBook Pro has a major advantage for musicians who are always on the road.

Mac mini—the best budget Mac

Why is the Mac mini also on the list of the best Macs for music-making? Mac mini had an update in March 2020, bringing in a 256GB SSD. Besides, it is a good choice if you’re on a budget. What’s great about the Mac mini is a small size, an extra audio-in port. In addition to this, you can customize it with a much more powerful processor and more RAM. But be ready to buy a keyboard, a mouse, a display to go with your Mac mini model.

Things to Consider Before Buying a Mac for Music Production

Consider these two factors when deciding on the best computer for music:

Portability

Among the first things to consider when determining which Mac to choose is to think over whether you need a desktop computer or a laptop. A laptop is the best choice for musicians who move a lot for work.

Connections

Using many additional instruments, such as monitors, headphones, USB instruments, and other audio interfaces, is essential. That’s why a limited number of USB ports might become an issue. Do check and compare the Connections sections when reviewing Mac specifications.

Mac Music Software

Here are our 2020 picks for the best apps for music-making on a Mac:

• If you’ve just started producing music, GarageBand has Smart Instruments helping you create a guitar, drum, synth, and orchestral parts without knowing how to play these instruments. GarageBand version 10.3 is full of surprises. New sound effects and instrument sounds and 1000 electronic and urban loops at your disposal are just the beginning. The Artist Lessons are finally free for those craving to learn songs taught by famous artists.
• Logic Pro X is called GarageBand's 'companion' and is, in fact, Apple's professional audio software. If you're an electronic musician and want to experiment with sound, you might opt for Logic Pro X. The great news is that you can get a 90-day free trial. However, you’ll need to run macOS 10.14.6 (macOS Mojave) or later. Moreover, this app is rather resource-consuming, so the best MacBook for Logic Pro X is either a 13-inch MacBook Pro or a 16-inch model.
• Ableton Live 10 makes your DJ experience smooth. Being a DAW it offers empowered MIDI sequencing hardware and software. With this app working on MIDI controllers is hustle-free now.
• PreSonus Studio One 4 Prime is for you if you’re still deciding whether you’re just at the beginning of your music-making career. It is free! A perfect app to start creating music with. Being a full-scale digital studio, it offers the Artist and Pro editions and an improved drum editor to make your instrument editing workflow easier.
• Cakewalk SONAR Mac Prototype is another free app used to be available on Windows only. However, now it can be installed on a Mac too.

How to Prepare your Mac for Music Recording?

Recording music does sound like a high-load process for your Mac. Full storage, apps responding longer than usual, or a spinning wheel on your screen may slow you down. So how to get back to productive work?

For starters, it's always a good idea to clean RAM. The rule applies—the more memory available, the faster your Mac should run. Memory Cleaner feature in MacKeeper frees up RAM with just a few clicks and lets you know which apps may be eating up memory without you even knowing it.

Another thing that may hamper music recording is the lack of free space. Music-making requires some extra gigabytes at hand, so you can use such MacKeeper tools as Safe Cleanup and Duplicates Finder to scan your Mac for old copies of files, caches, or apps leftovers and safely remove them.

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We hope our guide helped you choose the proper computer for music-making. Now go and grab your instrument or mic, plug it into your new Mac, and get rockin’!

Working on a music production project on a slow computer can be very stressful. Imagine getting system dropouts everytime you hit play when composing. That’s an instant creative killer.

In this article you will learn some tips to optimizing your Windows & Mac computer for music production. These tips may get you a small speed boost, without having to buy a new computer.

That said, sometimes you’re better off simply upgrading your computer. However, if you want to squeeze out a little more life out of your computer or a little strapped for cash right now, here are 9 tips to optimize your computer for music production.

1 – Increase buffer size & allow multithreaded processing

The first thing you should do is to adjust your audio settings in your DAW.

Go to audio settings and increase the buffer length/size as high as possible to allow your CPU more time to process the audio.

Generally, keep the buffer size small when recording, to avoid latency. But when you mixing, you can allow a higher buffer size as you load more plugins and effects into your project.

Next make sure to allow multithreaded processing in your DAW, so that all of your CPU cores can work together and not leave all the work to a single core. It’s worth checking it, in case you left it unchecked.

Fl Studio feature: If you are on Fl Studio, turn on “Smart Disable” – a feature in FL Studio that allows you to disable plugins that are not used. Don’t worry, you can re-enable them as soon as you need them again.

2 – High-performance mode (Windows)

If you’re using a laptop running on Windows, go into your computer power settings and make sure that you’ve selected high-performance mode.

Then go into the advanced settings and check that you’ve set your minimum processor state to 100%.

Sure, your computer will use more energy and get hot – but you wouldn’t want to do music production a slow processing computer anyway. Although, make sure to keep your laptop cool by placing it on a laptop cooling pad.

3 – Audio & effects housekeeping

With the experimentation you do when arranging and producing music, you’ll quickly fill up your project with unused effects, audio files, loops and tracks.

These items takes up space and RAM on your computer. So every now and then, it make sense to clear off audio clips and effects that you’re not using, such as old vocals tracks or any samples you are not using in your track.

Depending on the DAW you use, there is usually a way to clear unused audio clips.

For example, if you’re on Logic Pro X, go the ‘Project’ tab by clicking the ‘Browsers’ in the upper right hand corner. Click ‘Select Unused’ then head to Project Management and click ‘Clean Up’.

Brian li shows how to delete unused audio files in Logic Pro on his blog.

Andhere’s a example on FL Studio:

Go to “Tools”, select ” MACROS” then choose “Purge Unused Audio Clips”.

Depending on the DAW you use, the steps may be different. However the reason we do this is the same. Clear out junk and redundancies whenever you don’t need them.

4 – Turn on your internet and background apps

When you produce music, it’s advisable to close all apps and turn off your internet connection.

Why? Any app that is running on the background actually uses RAM and CPU processing. Especially if you’re on an older computer, it’s probably a good idea to free up processes as much as possible – so turn off any apps that you’re not using while making music.

A common CPU-hog is caused by file sharing applications, such as Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. The file syncing that happens in the background, often takes up a fair bit of CPU processing. So if you have those types of apps on your computer, try to pause syncing and turn off your internet connection to momentarily save up some processing juice for your DAW.

Besides, doing this also enables you to focus better without finding yourself scrolling on social media – which can turn into a bad habit.

5 – Bounce your MIDI tracks to audio

If you use lots of software instruments and MIDI tracks, you might quickly run out of processing juice on your computer. When you playback a software instrument track with MIDI tracks, your computer has to process quite a lot – converting MIDI data, sequencing and playing it back into audio – all real-time.

It’s a good practice to bounce your MIDI tracks into audio whenever possible.

You’ll lose the ability to go back and change things, but this is one of the best computer processing saver with music production. What I recommend is to create different project file versions of your track, so you can go back to older project anytime, should you need to adjust a certain MIDI track.

If you’re on Logic Pro, the ‘freeze’ track does exactly this – with the exception that it allows you to unfreeze your track and work on your MIDI file.

And on Studio One – you can do this by using the ‘transform to audio feature’.

6 – Use Group/Bus tracks for compressing and EQ

Sometimes you don’t need to use effect inserts in each of your individual tracks. Instead, you may even gain more control over your mix and reduce your computer’s processing load by using group or bus tracks for compression and EQ-ing work.

If you find yourself running out of processing power, sending individual tracks to a reverb bus (with one effect), rather than inserting the reverb effect on every individual track.

Sure this might limit the way you do mixing – but mixing with bus tracks can sometimes proof rewarding when you’re able to get a more controlled sound.

7 – Invest in a solid-state hard drive

If you’re on an aging computer or laptop for music production, consider upgrading its hard drive from a mechanical hard disk to a solid state hard drive (SSD).

The performance benefits are huge. The main culprit that makes older computers slow is often the hard drive, which quickly turns into a bottleneck for speed.

A faster SSD hard drive enables your computer to process information faster, which is important for music production as your DAW reads & playback audio files from your hard disk in real-time. SSDs are now quite affordable these days, and depending on the computer you use, it can be fairly easy to replace it yourself.

Some SSD recommendations for music production:

SSDs for desktop PC

• Samsung 970 Evo Plus – one of the fastest M.2 SSDs in the market.
• WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD – no more loading screens.

SSDs for laptop/notebooks

• Samsung SSD 860 QVO – SATA interface, goes up to 1TB.
• ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro – Reliable and fast M.2 interface SSD

8 – Invest in more RAM

Not quite a optimization tip, but when buying a computer or looking to upgrade for speed, besides upgrading your hard drive to SSD – consider getting more RAM for your computer.

Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) are RAM-hungry applications. In fact, at this point of writing, most DAWs recommend having a minimum of 8GB RAM on your computer.

Which Mac To Buy For Music Production

Generally, the more tracks, instrument samplers, effects and VSTs you have in your arrangement, the more RAM you are going to need to run smoothly.

The good news is upgrading your computer’s RAM is often the cheapest, best upgrade you can do (unless you’re on a Macbook Pro 2016 & above, then you’re out of luck). If your computer has an empty RAM slot or can be upgraded – it’s worth spending that small bit to upgrade the RAM.

9 – Monitor your computer processes for rogue applications.

Over time of using your computer, regardless of whether you use a MAC or PC, you might have applications or services that you no longer use, running in the background, hogging the processor.

In fact, with some use and online browsing, some computers eventually get infected with malware and adware that can potentially use up processing power.

Make sure to monitor your system usage on a regular basis.

Free Music Download For Macbook

Simply launch ‘Activity Monitor’ on a Mac or ‘Task Manager’ on a PC and see if there’s any apps that is using your computer’s resources, RAM and CPU. If you find an app that is standing out, investigate the app. If you don’t use the app, uninstall it.

A word of advice is to Google the name of the processes that you don’t recognize on your task manager and see where it originates from. Before you kill any processes, always verify what they are (and do).

There are many third-party applications like CCleaner that helps you pin-point apps or processes that are hogging your system resources and gives you recommendations to quit or remove them. Again, be extra careful when using third party applications like this and double-check before you delete anything.

Which Mac For Music Production

Conclusion

Follow the few tips above and you should see some improvements in your system’s performance, helping you get a bit more out from your computer without having to buy a new one so soon.

Although eventually, it may make more sense to simply upgrade and buy a new computer – so that you stay productive on producing more music and not fixing processing issues on your computer.

Did you find any tip useful in this post? What are some good computer optimization tips for music production we’ve missed out? Let us know in the comment section below and we’ll add your tip right up.

About the author

Which Mac Is Best For Music Production

Anna Grant is a music aficionado and content writer at Supreme Tracks – an online recording studio where you can buy beats online. She plays keys and guitar and has many years of experience writing for the music industry.