Computer for Zebra 3 (and music production in general)

[abobby]

Hi,

I am considering buying a new desktop computer for music production (and video editing). I prefer Windows 11 over mac, and was aiming for a ryzen computer, but have lately started to consider mac mini. But I am not sure if I should go for mac mini 4m or mac mini 4m pro.

What is your view on pro vs. non-pro? And also, what are your thoughts on these options compared to a pc running ryzen? Whats your experierence with a software like zebra 3 (or Zebralette 3) on these computers?

Take care,
e

[Urs]

For Zebra(lette) 3 we currently see a minimal advantage on Macs, mostly in the UI part, but next year we plan to check out some improvements for Windows that might make things swing the other way again. Things never stand still for long, so I think either platform is fine in the long run, and you should probably choose what works best for you.

That said, Zebra 3 will come with a very detailed CPU measurement tool that shows the performance of individual modules alongside the CPU configuration. I think this might help people make informed decisions like yours, but of course this will only work after the release (still aiming for November/December). I hope that by spring next year there'll be forum threads with people posting their performance stats, so all sorts of CPUs can be compared nicely.

[sempondr]

... next year we plan to check out some improvements for Windows that might make things swing the other way again.

Did you, by any chance, test AMD vs Intel?
The word is that currently Intel has an edge when it comes to Zebra, Diva etc., is that true?

[Urs]

Well, we have some Intel, some AMD, some Apple silicon. It works on all of them, but we haven't had the time to do any ranking charts...

[abobby]

Thanks for a very helpful response!

[abobby]

Actually following up with an additional question. How big is the impact of 24 vs 32 GIG for U-he synths and effects?

[Urs]

Actually following up with an additional question. How big is the impact of 24 vs 32 GIG for U-he synths and effects?

So we recently checked and most memory goes into open UIs. Ours typically use something in the up to 100MB vicinity. But there are popular synths we tried from other companies that use like a whole GB for the UI alone, when it's open. So I think 32 GB is a good choice - even if our plug-ins don't need that, some plug-ins use a lot of RAM.

[jupiter8]

What CPU to buy for a DAW is ridicously complex and almost impossible to answer. There's so many variables.

For example Intel has historically beat AMD on running Kontakt due to higher memory speeds while AMD was faster on more computational loads.

Then there's the single vs multicore performance. I can imagine (though i don't know if it's actually the case) the king of running Diva would be one of those 100+ core AMD EPYCs due to it being heavily multithreaded. They're generally not good performers for DAWs though and a 16 core Ryzen is the way better choice due to a sweetspot of nr of cores and clock frequency. Not to mention the price and there's other problems with running a DAW on EPYC.

If you run out of singlecore performance doesn't matter how many additional cores you have and vice versa. I can easily imagine a project running fine on an Intel and not on an AMD and for another workload the opposite is true.

Then you have the plain weird like the new Relab 176 compressor. It runs way better on Apple Silicon than on AMD or Intel. Way way better than other benchmarks would have you believe for some reason.

[WalterH]

If anyone have Mac Mini M4 or Mac Mini M4 Pro, I'm interested in M4 chips specifically because it looks like it will be my next upgrade.
Can anyone share their experience with Z3 and how much load with complicated patches Z3 have on those Mac M4 Minis ?
Thanks in advance !

[Fannon]

My Ryzen (5950X) seems to handle Zebra 3 pretty well. The newer generation will be even better, I'm sure.

What probably helps is that there are only full cores, not small and big cores. Those tend to create problems with DAWs and plugins from what I'm reading..