What Mac Should You Buy for Composing?

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I recently upgraded my composing computer to a new Mac Studio and I’ve been getting some questions from composers about it. One of the biggest questions is how much internal storage and how much RAM should I get?

So I thought it might be helpful to run a few benchmarks that test what composers actually need.

This will be the first of 2 videos. In this one I’ll share my experiences with the Mac Studio, and I’ll be comparing the speed of hosting both Kontakt and Sine Player samples on the internal drive versus hosting them on an external USB drive, so you can decide how much internal storage and RAM you need to buy. Then in the next video, I’m going to do a side-by-side comparison between running VEPro directly on the Mac Studio, versus running a disabled track template, including showing you loading times, save times, and more.

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About David Kudell:
David Kudell is an LA-based music composer for film & TV. He is well known for being selected by JJ Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and Ramin Djawadi out of 11,000 composers as the winner of the “Spitfire Westworld Scoring Competition” to score a scene from the HBO show Westworld in 2020. His groundbreaking score shook up the composer community with its wholly original take on the scene, and instantly made David a household name among fellow composers.

As a composer, David has shown his ability to write music in a broad variety of styles and genres for film & TV. As part of composer Anne-Kathrin Dern's team, he recently contributed music to the Netflix film "The Claus Family 2," the gothic thriller film "Devil,” and romantic thriller “Have. Hold. Take.”

His album "Reel One," a collection of original themes for film and TV, is available on all streaming platforms.

In addition, he has written music and sample library demos for the premiere sample library companies Orchestral Tools and Native Instruments.

Born and raised in Southern California, David graduated with a Master's Degree in Film & Television Production from San Diego State University in 2000. After graduation, he worked in the post-production sound department on over 25 Hollywood films, including Black Hawk Down, Mission Impossible 3, and Kill Bill. He is also an accomplished video director, having filmed and produced hundreds of commercials at his company Rimrock Creative Media.

His background as a video director has led to his current success as a music composer, as his understanding of the filmmaking process gives him a film director's perspective on the best use of music to tell the story.

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[DavidKudellMusic]

November 2023 update: With the first benchmarks for the MacBook Pro M3 Max showing a similar CPU score to the M2 Ultra, it’s worth taking a good look at that option now, as you can have a portable machine with similar power. (Although the RAM maxes out at 128GB)

[rostasi]

Thanks for the info. As a composer, I’ve been using 64GB RAM on a 14 year old tower and I need to upgrade past El Capitan, so this was helpful.

[jessemcinturff]

Former apple store employee turned TV composer here: my endless thanks goes out to you, this is quite literally some of the best info I've ever seen for music people on how our computers work.

[owenathanael]

Did not expect that small of a difference between external and internal SSD times. Thanks for making this video! Truly helpful.

[joesalyers]

3 Pro Tips: You can clean the ram by opening the terminal and typing sudo purge then type your password (it won't show your password being typed). This cleans up RAM and some of the purgeable space on your SSD. So don't buy some app that cleans RAM because the tool is built into Mac OS. Also if you want to know down to the kilobyte how much ram each app is using just type top into the terminal it will give you a true breakdown of RAM, shared, cached memory, and CPU for each application. To quit top just hit the q key. Also on MacOS the Swap size is based on how much RAM you have. So 32GB and higher will only have a 1 GB swap, 16gb of RAM will have a 4 GB Swap and 8GB of Ram will have up to 10 gb of swap. You can cut down on the swap usage if you use a chrome based browser like Chrome, Opera, or Vivaldi, by going into the browser flags and disabling Swap. 99% of people never use swap from audio or video apps but background browser tasks will use it more than anything else. Great video by the way I just upgraded from a M1 Max Macbook Pro to a M2 Ultra with 128gb of RAM & 2TB drive so your review has been very helpful!!! Cheers!!

[frenchthomasmusic]

Finally ! Someone did it!... It’s so hard to find useful infos about tech from artists & composers, most of the time people just play the same midi / audio clip until system overload but that definitely not representative of how our workflow runs. Thank you and good luck with your work 🙏

[jasonhaug]

Dude thank you. You've open my eyes so much. I didn't realize you could optimize the sine player to use less ram. Incredibly helpful video.

[jonshamieh]

this is the most valuable video on youtube for modern VI composers considering new apple chips

[saugghos]

Great useful video. Can you make a video on hardware compatibility with interfaces like Focusrite, , MOTU, etc. 12:04 Do all these work seamlessly with m2 ultra mac studio

[MOBOfficial]

This is the vdo i been looking for man. Appreciate your time for making such a big advising vids . 🙏🏾❤️

[nlgcomposer]

I switched to a Mac Studio Ultra (2022) toward the end of the "growing pains" season, where everyone was finally starting to become compatible with the M1. It's been working great! I had originally tried the M1 Max and it was not up to the task.

[forfilmmusic]

This is such a great overview and tests for things I work with everyday. Thanks for all this work! Your videos are really aimed at the pros who deal with these issues. I learned some valuable new things. Waiting on new Mac studio now.

[DougHammer]

Excellent info David, thank you! I just set up a new M2 Mac Studio Ultra 64GB 4TB and put everything on the internal. I am surprised by Kontakt loading times. For video work though, the internal is great.

[jigsound]

Amazing, thanks for the comparison! 👌🙌 Still struggling with a 2015 iMac here. 😅

[rossdonald]

Will be interesting to hear what you think about the new ranges (M4), about to be launched I'm looking to make a purchase soon from my Intel, iMac 2019 with 16GB Ram!

[ParadoxLostMusic]

Big thanks to you for going through all of this so other composers like me don't have to. Thinking about an upgrade and this was tremendously helpful!

[JoelBrandonMedia]

Recently learned that above the M1 Pro, you are basically wasting money on the new chips, unless you need to edit 8k video etc. They simply do not aid music production. At least according to James Zahn on YouTube. Great work! Super helpful video. 🎉🎉

[Pintosonic]

I’m not using a lot of sample based orchestral instruments like you do but I’m using a lot of VSTs and I went for a base Mac mini M2 PRO with the ram upgraded to 16M and the internal SSD to 1TB. I have a 2T USB4 external SSD. I’m always amazed how this thing doesn’t break a sweat even with a large project with dozens and dozens of VSTs, with automations and side chains all over the place. I’m only bouncing tracks that are using external instruments now. And even then I’m still running all the signal chain, only the raw audio signal out of the audio interface is bounced.

[johnhahn]

Thanks for the info David!! This is perfect in that I'm currently getting by with a 2017 iMac making sacrifices to not overload my system. This week I went into my studio to build on a song to find a black screen with a folder with a "?"!! Can you say panic! 8 new songs built on this computer. I was able to recover but I'm going to upgrade on my terms (while the computer is still working) and have had enough of compromises to save cpu. Lots of videos full of info regarding the need for lots of gpu from video content creators. I've learned that the key for me with audio recording will be cpu, which brought me to the studio ultra. Your info pushed me over the top...I'm going in!! Based on your info I'm not going to upgrade past the standard config of 64GB ram and 1TB HD. THANKS for your effort on these tests!

[silvio_composer]

Grande David! Anecdotally looking at read/write speeds on my external 10Gps USB drives made me suspect such an outcome. Thank you so much for putting this thorough comparison together, it's really helpful. 🙏🏻