Is now the time to replace my aging PC Music setup with an Apple M1 Mac Mini?

So my current setup for music has served me well for almost 5 years:

HP Omen Desktop PC (released in February 2017), i5-7400, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD

However, I have noticed recently that it has been struggling on some of my larger projects and I am starting to think about replacing it.

At the same time, I recently was able to pick up a Mac Mini M1, 8GB, 256GB SSD at too good a price to miss and hence this blog post and video (Not the 16gb model I was looking for but I couldn’t resist this bargain!)

The Mac Mini M1 & FL Studio

I was pleased at how well the setup process went with the Mac-Mini. FL Studio installed easily and there were no nasty shocks waiting for me as a result of running on a new O/S. That said it did bark at the default sound processing that is available on the Mac Mini but as soon as I installed an audio interface (an old Focusrite Solo MkII) it was fine. It looks like this beta of FL Studio is now fully Apple Silicon and for this test I did not check the Rosetta flag at all – with no problems occurring (I believe there are still one or two bits of FL that are not yet fully native – but I haven’t hit on any of them and so far, so good )

I decided just to video myself for the purposes of this video as I didn’t want any overheads of running video capture software during the test and also wanted to avoid the faff of dealing with the resultant video captures from two separate systems.