KVR Audio

mwooten777 · Post by **mwooten777** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:09 pm

I have a 2018 Mac Mini I use for all my "home" stuff. I also do a little music, just for my own personal enjoyment. When my CPU gets a little overloaded I often think I need to optimize my Mac for music (for example, disable iCloud, Dropbox, Onedrive, monitoring programs like CleanMyMac, etc.).

What's the best way to run two different scenarios or setups of my Mac - one for regular home use and one for making music? I explored different user profiles but that seems to go too far - virtually everything is different. And IIRC I also ran into validation issues because the "user" wasn't the same.

Thanks

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:42 pm

Do you really need all those programs to be active all the time?

What I would do to my system is to disable useless Dashboard
https://www.howtogeek.com/tips/how-to-d ... -mac-os-x/

and Spotlight indexing
https://electrictoolbox.com/disable-spo ... g-mac-osx/

mwooten777 · Post by **mwooten777** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:50 pm

Good thoughts, but I think there would be at least 5 - 10 changes I'd make to do music versus home stuff. I'm wondering if there's a way to make all those changes easier than making them manually.

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:57 pm

Dunno, I never had issue having single macOS system to run audio and internet simultaneously or having to "optimize" beyond disabling few useless things on OS level like ones I mentioned. But I wasn't heavy on cloud services and cleaners, so don't know how much resources they all really take, but I don't remember being bothered with Dropbox resource usage before, I definitely used that heavily at one point.

Michael L · Post by **Michael L** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 2:02 pm

When your "CPU gets a little overloaded" use Activity Monitor to get an overview of what is using your system resources and close those programs. Or restart to clear caches, and only open music software. And minimise the number of login items. If you want to dive deep, run EtreCheck

mwooten777 · Post by **mwooten777** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 3:17 pm

You make good points, all of which I generally do. It's really not a huge problem for me. I was just wondering if someone's figured out a cool way to easily have a specific, different setup when wanting to make music.

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 4:18 pm

Some folks dual boot, but that is mostly because they use different versions of OS for some reason... sorry I really don't know about setting up different accounts and all that, never saw the need to do it or know anyone that does it, there really wasn't issue to use same machine for work and fun, dunno, maybe don't have all those cloud syncing and system indexing on default, so you can just restart and start fresh and than engage those services if you really need to... I don't see the point of those services going all the time either, turn them on when you want to use them to scan or sync files and turn them off after it's done, it's really not something that must be on all the time either.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 10:22 pm

this would be a different sitch with an M1, because memory pressure is relieved some by that architecture, but on my hardware I definitely do not leave stuff that isn't part of the music making running while working at all. I can leave my VE Pro templates up and re-render a video in Resolve, but I've closed the Cubase project window. The stuff which will run in background is pretty negligible with nothing running. So no, there is no particular gain in another account better than don't use resources you aren't at that moment using.

mwooten777 · Post by **mwooten777** » Wed Aug 11, 2021 11:17 pm

Thanks everyone for your input!

Using a Home Mac mini for Music Recording and Production