Ardour + Harrison + OS X = Mixbus

[Bro Shark]

What's the major difference between mixbus and other DAWs? Is it improved workflow, or does Mixbus actually sound different (better)?

[jhharvest]

I would say mostly the latter.

[Bro Shark]

OK, thanks. Where do you notice the difference? Care to elaborate at all?

[jhharvest]

It's a difficult question to answer without resorting to 'imo' or being infactual. What Harrison says:

It is our opinion that the "gross" defects in many workstations include internal clipping, lacking dither stages in the DSP processing, insufficent ramping of dsp coefficients, multiple bit-depth/format conversions, out-of-control gain stages causing plugins to work outside their intended range, routing choices that cause latency/timing errors, inability to see meters such as compressor gain reduction without opening the plugin dialog, and poor user-interface integration.

That's marketing talk of course. I think the big differences are:
Harrison's EQ / dynamics / saturation plugins built into the software. This accounts for 95% of the sound. Especially the saturation in the busses, if you decide to use them.
Pan law. I don't know what they've done with it. This is probably what they've billed as their 'Harrison summing engine'.
Internal dithering, sometimes even between stages. In theory we shouldn't need it - dither should be applied at the end where bit depth is reduced. However, adding it in the intermediate stages does appear to "smooth" out the sound. Probably an illusion, like adding saturation (i.e. distortion). But if it works, hey.

So, it's different. Better? Depends who you ask, I suppose. For me it's easier to produce mixes with punch and clarity with Mixbus than it is with ProTools with the same plugins. The obvious difference of course being that for Mixbus I have the Harrison plugins as well and they are always just a mouse click away.

[Studiodawg]

With Harrison Mixbus, it is very easy to get great sounding mixes and so far it's been virtually impossible for me to overload the system and drive it into digital clip/crap. My aggrevation comes from a large work load of projects and the unavoidable inefficiency I discovered in Ardour. I'm used to having multiple files open in my "standard working environment" and find it counter-intuitive and archaic to only be able to work with one file at a time. Because my primary use for Mixbus is to mixdown to stereo 24-bit files from imported wave files (session tracks)...I can't import and have open 2 or more songs, I guess, because there is some "known issue" that when you open a new session while your initial session is open- you crash the app...not quite ready for primetime IMHO. In defense of Harrison, they have been prompt and courteous with my concerns. They wanted me to report crash logs, etc. I don't have time to "guinea pig". Unfortunately, I have "unadopted" Mixbus as my primary mixdown DAW and went back to Samplitude, which is a very mature "primetime" mix engine.

[jhharvest]

I haven't encountered crashing when you load a new session. It'll close the old one though, so if that's an absolute feature requirement then it's understandable why you don't want to use it. Personally I find it impossible to mix more than one project at a time due to limited amount of ears and hands...

[Studiodawg]

How about balancing two songs against each other for continuity? ...I A/B tracks between songs all the time to help build a mix that translates throughout the album. Lately, I have been working with multitrack location recordings from different dates (different settings)...access to multiple sessions is a requirement in my world.

[Studiodawg]

OK, thanks. Where do you notice the difference? Care to elaborate at all?

Harrison Mixbus seems to make the recording sound "more expensive" to me. Scientifically, I have no clue what that translates to...nonetheless, when I get past my backlog and schedule (projected, July 2012) I will "play" with Ardour and Mixbus to do some tracking of my own that is not deadline and workload related...Mixbus "slickifies" the sound...I like it.

[jhharvest]

How about balancing two songs against each other for continuity? ...I A/B tracks between songs all the time to help build a mix that translates throughout the album. Lately, I have been working with multitrack location recordings from different dates (different settings)...access to multiple sessions is a requirement in my world.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. My workflow is just a bit different: I'll bounce a song once it's finished and play it separately to compare new material against it rather than make changes to both actively.

[BenLoftis]

there is some "known issue" that when you open a new session while your initial session is open- you crash the app...

Just to be clear, that bug was fixed in 2.0.5 (or before, I forget)

It is still the case that an instance of Mixbus can only open one session at a time. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

However it is possible to open 2 or more instances of Mixbus at the same time if you "trick" osx by having 2 different packages on disk. You can sync them together by choosing JACK as the time source. You can even route between them, of course. And because JACK is multiprocessor-enabled on OSX, each instance will get its own CPU core for DSP. I think this will solve your problem of comparing mixes side-by-side. I just tried it, and it worked fine. But all of this is strictly try-it-at-your-own-risk. You need a lot of cores and big screens for this to be practical

Have fun!
-Ben Loftis
Harrison Consoles

[JWL]

For me, the main selling point of MixBus is that it runs on Linux. It gives me a viable DAW in my OS of choice. The benefits of a running a DAW on top of a stable OS is HUGE and cannot be understated. No nasty windows surprises with audio anymore.

Having to learn a new editing system (I was used to SONAR in Windows) wasn't my idea of fun but really it's no big deal. Editing in MixBus is quite powerful, it's possible to do everything I've needed to do; in some ways its audio editing is better than SONAR.

I also agree that sound in MixBus is nice, easy to get a good polished "more expensive" (heh heh) mix more quickly. Having EQ and compression, ready to go on each channel/bus, as well as saturation on the 8 buses, is fabulous.

Despite my genuine love and affection for MixBus, no product is perfect (and MixBus/Ardour are still in heavy development). Several of the following complaints are specific to the Linux version only. Here are my main beefs with Mixbus 2.x:

- no VST support in Linux. I don't quite understand this since you can compile Ardour with VST. If it's a licensing issue, then imho Harrison should pay for the license. They are, after all, charging for MixBus as a commercial app.

- no mp3 support in Linux. Same reasons/rationale as above. While mp3 is far from my first choice as a file format, it is necessary in order to work in today's environment. Harrison should either find a way to include the LAME software as a plugin, or go ahead and pay Fraunhofer for mp3 support within this commercial app, or at least enable it to work with built-in mp3 support (via LAME) within most Linux distributions, as you have done with built-in OSX mp3 support.

- no MIDI support in MixBus/Ardour. This has changed for the upcoming Ardour 3 which is now in beta; presumably these changes will carry over to new versions of MixBus.

- rendering time seems slower than what I was used to in Sonar. This is far from a showstopper, but deserves a mention. Having said that, I certainly cannot complain about the quality of renders, they are great.

The aforementioned limitation of only having 1 project file open at a time isn't a big deal for me at all.

All in all I really love MixBus. Once the above 4 problems are solved, I'll only be able to complain about things outside of MixBus (such as the lack of high-end plugins native to Linux).