New Mac OSX Daw - Harrison Mixbuss

[leedsquietman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa_o6hmJg3Q

Harrison consoles (as used in the making of Michael Jackson's Thriller album etc) have partnered up with Ardour to release a fairly cool looking audio DAW for Mac OSX called Mixbuss - certainly Harrison EQs and boards are the bomb, so it looks like an interesting mixing tool for 80 bucks !!!

[djsynchro]

it has built-in tape saturation which kinda leaves you to wonder, if it was any good they could sell it as a plug-in by itself for a lot more than 80 bucks.... will wait for the tests not on Mac

[leedsquietman]

The Harrison EQ for UAD-2 costs 200 bucks by itself.

I don't think they would put their name to rubbish, they have one of the top reputations of console manufacturers, right up there with Neve, SSL, and API etc - I think a big part of the price is.

a) 80 dollars is an INTRODUCTORY price. (will probably increase if it takes off)
b) Ardour is open source freeware, so that obviously is one big cost reduction - they didn't have to develop the DAW part of the mixbuss console from scratch. Although it's freeware, Ardour is actually very full featured for AUDIO especially. It's crossfading and audio editing certainly is better than what Live presently offers.

This type of application could well compliment Live users well. COmpose and arrange in Live, export all and mix in Mixbuss.

One of the best tape saturators I've ever heard is Jeroen Breebart's FEROX plugin - which is FREE. You can't always judge quality by price, for example, Reaper for a non commercial license is 60 bucks but no-one can say that it's a poor 60 buck sequencer, many are using it in preference to 500 dollar sequencers in Logic, Cubase etc.

If they made it for PC, I'd definately want to demo it.

[fishmonkey]

it's a shame that there's no demo available, the only way to try is to buy...

even so, in my late nite delirium i seem to have bought a copy!

haven't even installed it yet, but i love the idea of having a console kinda thing to mix in, as although i love Live's session view, arrangement view does my head in with its horizontal channel controls...

[leedsquietman]

Cool.

Let us know what you think about it when you've had some time to play !

[muthafunka]

Interesting idea, funny though how the narration on this is one of the most amateurish compression jobs I've ever heard in a commercial production....go figure

[Forge.]

even so, in my late nite delirium i seem to have bought a copy!

you sound like me 6 years ago!!

and frankly if I still had a credit card I'd have done the same

looks awesome. I would love to try it.

Makes me think even more there should be a "Live session" version of Ableton that is only session view so that we could have session automation etc and just mix in somethign like this.

the crossfades looked wicked - somethign I think Ableton has really done wrong in Live 8

[SubFunk]

80 dollars?

that looks good, man.

for someone who just needs a good tracking and mixing device, sweet.

[john doe by choice]

I have a few questions, since this actually looks pretty cool...

No MIDI aside from track autmation, right? So, no virtual instruments, if I read correctly.

ReWire?

If no Rewire, how would one prepare a mix coming from Live? Not talking about track export, but about the actual mix in Live.

Built in Comp/Limit/EQ/Filter on every channel is awesome, but how does it handle, CPU-wise, given those extras?

[SubFunk]

If no Rewire, how would one prepare a mix coming from Live? Not talking about track export, but about the actual mix in Live.

i don't understand what you mean, care to explain it differently?

you want to write in Live and do the mix down in harrison mix bus?

[john doe by choice]

If no Rewire, how would one prepare a mix coming from Live? Not talking about track export, but about the actual mix in Live.

i don't understand what you mean, care to explain it differently?

you want to write in Live and do the mix down in harrison mix bus?

pretty much yes, since it looks like MixBus doesn't handle virtual instruments. So, the question is, what would one do while writing in live to prepare for mixing in MixBus, in the sense of "Mixbus will do this better, so best not to waste my time in Live".

[SubFunk]

If no Rewire, how would one prepare a mix coming from Live? Not talking about track export, but about the actual mix in Live.

i don't understand what you mean, care to explain it differently?

you want to write in Live and do the mix down in harrison mix bus?

pretty much yes, since it looks like MixBus doesn't handle virtual instruments. So, the question is, what would one do while writing in live to prepare for mixing in MixBus, in the sense of "Mixbus will do this better, so best not to waste my time in Live".

exporting all the stems without any plugs that are part of a mix down... from time 0 to the end of the track (or actually it's enough to the end of the sound, the start is important)... so you have for all stems the same starting point when importing into mix bus so you don't loose your arrangement.

it's very simple.

[john doe by choice]

Actually, I know about that already, hence why I said "not talking about track export"

What I mean is the use of comps, limiters, etc, either on individual tracks or master output in Live, as opposed to doing it in MixBus after the fact - I guess it's more of a "which host has better quality native sweetening/mastering". The more I think about it though, the more I'm thinking that it's subjective to the users purpose.

[SubFunk]

^^^ yes totally.

[polyslax]

Just in case it's not clear, you can drag and drop audio tracks into the mixer but you can also use Jack to directly record your DAW's output.

From the quickstart guide:

Before running Mixbus, you must install the JACK package. JACK is a system service that allows
for the interconnection of audio between applications. For example, you can use JACK to record
the output of Logic directly into a Mixbus track for live processing or recording. Mixbus requires
JACK to connect to the computer's sound system. JACK is a free download.