Hi friend!

If you are reading this, thank you! As many of you may already know, I have been working extremely hard building a recording/mixing studio space here in Portland for the last 8 months (pic is from an old space). In that time, my income has been drastically reduced due to focusing a lot of time on the build logistics and waiting on things to be done in my space (like the whole house needed new pipes and they had to replace a wall/ceilling on my studio space in order to access the pipes). As such, I've taken on considerable credit card debt (I was expecting the build to take 4-6 months maximum), and burned through most of my savings in the process. The good news is that the studio space is finally finished!

The bad news is that my laptop (a 2020 Intel Macbook Pro) is slowly dying. It has been dying for over a year if I'll be honest, but I've always been able to manage to get my work done with it. Sadly, yesterday was the first day I experienced being unable to make it work. The issue first started maybe 2 years ago where projects i used to be able to run perfectly fine would max out my CPU power. Then it was streaming while mixing would max out everything out. Then it was (about 4 months ago now) streaming while doing anything would render my computer non-functional. I thought, "Okay I can stream other stuff like talking and I can still work, I can just focus on doing projects and save up for a new one." Well now I can't even do that. I was in a session that was only 69 tracks (nice) and I often work on sessions with well over 100 tracks. The Macbook Pro completely slowed to a crawl, it took 2-10 seconds to do anything and the mouse was stuttering all the time. While yes, I could record and hear the audio played back, the experience was a mess and it isn't right to charge clients for that time, nor is it professional. I have already run lots of diagnostics, repairs, and am currently in the process of doing a format and redo, but if it works, it is only delaying the inevitable.

What I'm seeking and why:

My work requires a LOT of ram and CPU power. Most larger projects use up 50GB of ram easily. My currently laptop has 64GB of ram for plenty of headroom. When I got it I knew I was already hitting 30GB regularly, so i upgraded to 64GB. Unfortunately the mac mini i'm looking at doesn't allow for higher than 64GB upgrades and the new Macbooks that would allow me to reach more than 64GB is double the price of the mac mini I'm looking at. It would feel like overkill to own that. I originally was looking at a used mac studio, but even there to get the specs I'd need to spend about as much as the new Mac Mini M4 Pro. So that's why I'm looking at a brand new machine. Plus the expandability that thunderbolt 5 allows for is incredible! The specs i'm getting would match my current Macbook Pro, but with a modern CPU/GPU and small form factor - I'll be able to reclaim desk space at the expense of a screen. I was hoping i could wait until next year and get an M4 mac studio that is likely going to be released soon, but that also may have been overkill for my needs.

The new Mac will allow me to live stream music production session again (some of my most popular streams and also something I offer to remote mixing gigs), potentially ditch my PC, which I currently use for entertainment, live streaming, and video editing, and create more YouTube content around audio. I have many scripts written for YouTube, some of which I've teased on live streams. Also my PC's CPU and RAM isn't able to handle the workloads I put my Macbook Pro under, but it has a better GPU so I use it for things that need that. I bought it specifically for a good GPU at the time and a mid range CPU to handle the work I would be doing on it.

My plan if I reach my goal:

If I exceed funding I will be doing the following with it:

I currently have a few projects I need to complete, but these issues are making it nearly impossible. I am grateful that there is no due date set yet on those projects, but the sooner I get them done the easier it'll be to pay rent.

I really don't like asking for money from people unless I knew it would make a substantial difference and would solve something that is a one time thing that wouldn't need to be asked for again. If you can't donate, that's okay please share this GFM around or relax to some of my music on YouTube.

Here's a link with all of my socials and music: https://linktr.ee/creativemindsmusic - if you stream my music or watch my previous streams on twitch it'll put some pennies in my pocket. It all helps.

I appreciate any and all help you can give me with this. It is my livelihood right now. Thank you!