This thread is nearly five years old. Too much has changed.

While any current Mac or Windows laptop from anyone can run BIAB without breaking a sweat, this is not true for many other types of applications we might run.

Those of us who deal with AV and AI find that only the most powerful computers we can buy will do the job in a reasonable time period. My Mac Studio M2 Ultra renders AV ok—I’m not crunching animation files. A 2 hour video with multiple edits and special effects might take 8–15 minutes to render and perhaps another 10 minutes to export. Considering that my 2010 iMac would take a week to render that same file, this is pretty good and what I’ve come to expect.

Recently, I picked up some fairly sophisticated AI tools. Holy cow! Having done stem splitting in the past, I hadn’t really considered how long that simple task took—should’ve paid attention. I was surprised how much horsepower is required to render some of those files. A 4 minute project I was working on a few days ago in ACE Studio AI took 15 minutes to render and nearly 45 minutes as four tracks. Yikes! I may have to buy the new Mac Pro rumored to ship in a few months just to keep up.

BIAB 2024 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5