Ok, primarily I wanted to make sure you were actually monitoring the thread rather than just mass spamming. To answer your question I teach as an adjunct faculty in a US University in the theater department. I usually only teach one class a semester as there is no full ‘sound’ program in this department so I rotate between three different classes.
Mixbus, as Leatus pointed out, is a bit more than simply Ardour with branding, as it includes a lot of DSP built in from Harrison Consoles. So each channel is a full ‘channel strip’ with EQ and compression, along with 8 mixbusses with their own tone/eq, tape saturation, and compressor, and finally a master bus with it’s own tone/eq, compression, and tape saturation. It is developed in parallel to Ardour and many changes/improvements are brought back into Ardour, however it is not completely open source in that the DSP from Harrison is not open source, but the rest of the software is and can be seen in Ardour’s SVN in fact.
I use this because it reflects an analog console style workflow very well, so I use this to teach my students the basics of how to mix before moving them to mixing in a live context with a console, which is my primary emphasis when teaching. Since it reflects the analog console, that transition is a bit smoother than if i tried to use Ardour itself or ProTools, or one of many of the ‘popular’ DAWs(Though not all, a few now are adopting this more analog console style workflow, I found Mixbus the best fit, and since i was already familiar with Ardour it worked well)
Depending on which class I teach, I am teaching a very brief and basic introduction to a variety of software. I use Audacity to teach destructive file editing, and do a basic introduction to Reaper and ProTools as well, all in my introduction to sound technology class. During this class I also give a brief overview of Ardour and give my students the option to complete any of their projects in a DAW of their choice, including Ardour which some students do use, with the exception of the project I give them to learn destructive file editing which obviously has to be done in Audacity or another destructive file editor.
In my mixing class I use Mixbus primarily for the reasons stated above. Students mix primarily existing sessions that are freely available on the internet from places like Mike Senior’s ‘Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio’ resource site, and WeatherVane Music. For my introduction to theater sound design they can use any program they feel confident with, as of right now I don’t teach much about how to do assignments in that class, the prerequisite is that they have already taken my intro to sound technology class at that point. Mixing projects in this class and my intro to sound technology vary, ranging from storytelling through SFX, to creating their own sound effects, to mixing together a full session on occasion.
Has this road been without problems? Not at all. But overall it has been a good things and I find what frustrates my students most has been more learning how to operate in a DAW more than anything, something they would run into in any DAW, open or closed source. The few problems they have had directly related to Mixbus or Ardour I am personally skilled enough to fix fairly fast, but especially with Mixbus Harrison is also very responsive to support as well. Otherwise Ardour’s support does exist, but may be difficult to ascertain for anyone from the outside looking in as it follows the typical open source support channels of IRC and Mailing Lists more than anything.
Seablade
