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[Zhillsguy]

My very first Mac product, a "refurbished" late 2014 Mac Mini I5 4260U 1.4 GHz, 4 Gig, 500 gig platter drive. Runs extremely slow.

This originally came with Mojave but I never used it. I erased the disk and reinstalled the OS and it automatically upgrades to Monterey. I've searched on line but haven't found working links for backdating to Mojave, if that's the issue.

Everything seems to be fully functional, just very slow to boot and doing anything else after. Nothing seems out of the ordinary in Activity Monitor.

Installed MC without a hitch and connected to a Windows share, but haven't hooked it up to the Scarlett 6i6 yet. This will be used for audio only via USB.

1. Is this a potential hardware issue or would a prior OS make a difference?
2. Will an SSD make that much difference? I can't imagine this is how it worked new.

Thanks.

[blgentry]

It's almost 2022, so an 8 year old computer with a spinning drive probably "feels very slow" by today's standards.  Importantly, in my experience, MacOS sometime around 2010 or so was really designed with SSD drives in mind.  SSDs make a shocking difference in performance on Mac.

I've recently upgraded a late 2011 Macbook Pro from a spinning drive to an SSD.  The owner was expecting good things and was not disappointed.  We went from booting in about 1:30 to booting to login in about 20 seconds.  After login another 12 seconds or so.

That said, I think MC will run just fine on this machine, as is.  It just won't feel "snappy" like a modern machine.  But put an SSD in it and everything will change.  It won't make it a 2021 computer, but it will feel very different.

Brian.

[JimH]

Spinning drives aren't that slow.  An SSD is definitely faster, but you might not notice the difference unless you had a long very intensive disk access.

[Zhillsguy]

Thanks gentlemen.

As-is my Rpi4 is better in every way for MC. It takes time to load even Finder. When playing MC audio, scrolling through playlists with app remotes causes stutter.

See attached screen clip, this is after running MC .94 overnight. Is 33 GB of virtual memory normal?

Edit: I see this virtual memory is the same for all processes, so may be normal?
I "closed" MC, but it still has a process going (does the mac version have a separate MC media sharing process?), I cannot bring MC back up to full screen, and it started playing RP on its own. I also have another screen clip, MC had a lot of disk activity. My library isn't that large, 43,000 or so tracks.

I haven't rebooted yet, and things are worse. I forced MC media sharing closed and re-opened MC. Now it won't close, is unresponsive and other apps like Safari and Activity Monitor don't close, just get minimized to the launch pad.

Hopefully I can backdate the OS, if that is the answer.

[JimH]

That sounds like something wrong with the machine.  Are there any external drives involved?

[bob]

With 4 gigs, I wouldn't go past Catalina.
 
If you did a restore from the internet it would go all the way back to Yosemite (10.10) and appear to be really fast (and way out of security updates).
If it's an original disk you might have an older recovery on it as well.
See this article:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-macos-recovery-on-an-intel-based-mac-mchl338cf9a8/12.0/mac/12.0

You could either update from there or make an external USB installer stick. See here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

You absolutely should put in a SSD. The difference on a Mac of that vintage will be staggering.
Check this for details. It even looks like that model supports 6gb/sec sata.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/mac-mini-aluminum-unibody-faq/how-to-upgrade-hard-drive-aluminum-unibody-mac-mini.html

[bob]

BTW MC works just fine on a 2007 vintage 24" iMac (replaced the HD with a SSD) running High Sierra (10.13) including video.

[Zhillsguy]

BTW MC works just fine on a 2007 vintage 24" iMac (replaced the HD with a SSD) running High Sierra (10.13) including video.

Now that's encouraging, thanks Bob and to all. Yes, I did recovery from the internet to Yosemite, and it is much better, but still stutters audio when scrolling playlists. I tried to update the os, but none of the links I found on Apple's site worked in Safari, only goes white screen, but no matter at this point. I may put an SSD in it and keep it, but not looking forward to the task for this unit.

I haven't been able to get 4 channels out of the Scarlett 6i6 in windows since 1709(?), so it's linux or Core Audio for this setup. I'll update the thread if I move forward with the ssd swap....

[blgentry]

If you decide to do an SSD upgrade, it's MUCH easier if you buy a small external enclosure for the drive so that you can temporarily have both the SSD and the old spinning drive connected at the same time.

Once you have both set up, you can use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the spinning drive to the SSD.  Then you do the actual swap and pull the old drive out and replace it with the SSD.  If all goes well, you just reboot and *boom* your are up and running on the SSD with all of your original stuff exactly where it was when you started.

Macsales.com (Other World Computing) sells nice little packages with good SSD drives, inexpensive external enclosures (like and extra $10 for the enclosure) and a little set of tools for the weird screws and fasteners on many macs.

I've used their kits several times and have had great success with them.

Brian.

[bob]

Agree with Brian.
I've updated our 2012 Mini at work a bunch of times, I have archived SSD's back to 10.7 for it all the way through 11.1.
Until pretty recently all of our Mac builds were made on it (it was one of those models with an i7 and we added 16GB memory).
It's pretty straightforward to take apart and switch out drives.
There are good guides at iFixit for doing it.

[Library Eye]

The biggest is that is a really underpowered old Mac; the answer to question in title —  "Slow Mini?" — is Yes. The second issue is JRiver seems to run least best on Macs, but I can only say for sure having never run it on like a new, current computer — only older computers running latest macOS, Windows, and some Ubuntu derivatives.

I am running JRiver on an old Mac. It's fine.

a 2014 higher GHz i7 or probably even i5 with 16 GB or probably even 8 GB RAM and an SSD using the current macOS would run just fine, for instance. Not that I would suggest, at this point, getting a better 2014 because the current macOS is very likely the newest and last one it will run. The HDD is probably by far the biggest culprit. macOS stopped running well on those a while ago, maybe Mavericks is last one I can think of having acceptable performance in my personal experience.

All that being said, I have the "master" license and have run JRiver on assorted older equipment and the Mac version has simply been inferior in performance to Windows or Linux version. But no matter how much I prefer to use JRiver as my music library program, I wouldn't want to ever run Windows as my main OS unless I had to, and I wouldn't ever have to because there is Linux but then I wouldn't ever switch to Linux as my main OS over Mac because I need certain commercial software.

So, in summary from my experience –
• on a Mac, at least, you need an SSD and just in general I can't see trying to use a Mac now for much of anything with just 4GB RAM. The Mac spec'd as you describe I couldn't suggest for any use nowadays.
• the program runs best on Windows, like it's still primarily written for Windows… but compared to when I first tried the Mac version and found it unusable, for quite some time now using some decently spec'd old Mac or other, JRiver performance has been totally acceptable on a Mac. Linux app also seems to run better than Mac app so you may well be better off with your Rpi4 than that Mac as currently configured.

You could also try running Linux on that Mini and seeing if you prefer the performance. The one glaring issue with Linux version was no drag-and-drop / no rearranging songs in playlists or Now Playing queue and I think I read here that has recently been resolved; not sure, haven't run Linux version in a while.

[bob]

I guess it's all about what you think is reasonable performance.
I have a 2007 iMac with decent video card. That's the slowest but it's perfectly usable.
A 2011 MacBook Air. Runs fine on High Sierra with 4gb.
A 2014 MacBook Pro 8gb ram Catalina. Runs fine.
A 2020 M1 Mini 16Gb with Monterey. The fastest of course.
All have SSD's.
None will do 4k video (except for the M1). Not an issue for me.

[blgentry]

None will do 4k video. Not an issue for me.

I'm surprised to hear that.

My late 2014 iMac with a 5k screen and quad core i7 played 4k video seemingly just fine.  I did it very regularly using youtube with 4k video.  I also played my own 4k videos recorded with my iphone.  Also edited them, exported, and posted them to my youtube channel.

My 2020 M1 Mac Mini plays 4k video at least as well.  I just played a full MakeMKV rip of a 4k ultra bluray and had no issues with it either.  I played this one using MC28. 

Brian.

[bob]

I'm surprised to hear that.

My late 2014 iMac with a 5k screen and quad core i7 played 4k video seemingly just fine.  I did it very regularly using youtube with 4k video.  I also played my own 4k videos recorded with my iphone.  Also edited them, exported, and posted them to my youtube channel.

My 2020 M1 Mac Mini plays 4k video at least as well.  I just played a full MakeMKV rip of a 4k ultra bluray and had no issues with it either.  I played this one using MC28. 

Brian.

Syntax error. I meant except for the M1.
Pretty sure your iMac has much better video hardware than my laptop

[blgentry]

That all makes sense.  My iMac (which I sold last week) was a beast with the "biggest" graphics package available at the time.  So maybe it was more GPU powerful than your MBP.  Hard to say. 

Happy Holidays to Bob, Matt, Jim, Deanna (hope I spelled that right) and the whole JRiver crew!

Brian.