Harrison Mixbus is now available for Linux and OS X

Great news from Harrison Consoles .... and yes, for those who are curious, your purchase of Mixbus does generate some income for Ardour.

Mixbus™ is a full-featured Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with "True Analog Mixing"™: a combination of Harrison's world-renowned sound and features in a knob-per-function interface. Now cross-platform on both Linux and OSX, Mixbus provides a solution for engineers and mixers who need a recorder, editor and mixing system with world-class sound and features.

screenshot of Harrison Mixbus

Mixbus Features:

  • Straightforward “knob per function” mixer layout based on Harrison's renowned 32-series and MR-series music consoles.
  • Precision DSP algorithms for EQ, Filter, Compression, Analog Tape Saturation, and Summing based on Harrison's world-renowned large format analog and digital mixing consoles.
  • Unlimited stereo or mono input channels (based on available CPU power) featuring High-pass Filter, EQ, Compression, and 4 Mix Bus sends on every channel.
  • 4 Stereo Mix Buses (can be used for groups or auxes) featuring Tone controls, Compression, Sidechaining, and Analog Tape Saturation.
  • Stereo Master Bus that features Tone controls, Analog Tape Saturation, K-meter, and Limiting to help you make polished mixes.
  • Automatic delay compensation for any routing combinations of Tracks to Mixbuses and/or Master Bus. This allows for parallel paths with different plugins that remain time-aligned to the output.
  • Comprehensive "at-a-glance" metering with peak, peak hold, and compressor gain reduction visible on every track and bus.
  • Extensive DAW features via the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation.
  • Uses any sound I/O supported by ALSA and/or JACK on Linux
  • Supports LADSPA and LV2 plugins on Linux

We originally launched Mixbus for OSX in 2009, and it was a big success! Since then we've launched 6 free updates to our customers, added dozens of features, and built a community of users. The Linux version provides the same great features as the OSX version!

Purchase now at: harrisonconsoles.com - Mixbus.

Running it here on a single core 2.4 GHz AMD 3800+ cpu with 4G memory and on a dual-core laptop with a 2 GHz AMD TurionX2 and 3G memory.

Runs well on both boxes. :slight_smile:

Best,

dp

Yeah really cool! Bought it yesterday. I had a hard time opening my Ardor2 sessions in the beginning but after some fiddling around it worked.
The trick was to open them once again with ardour and create a snapshot where all input and output connections (for example connecting track 1 to master-in, etc) for all channels were disconnected. Opening that snapshot with mixbus worked then. It even reconnected everything correctly. Maybe this info is useful for someone having the same problems.

cool stuff! Looking forward to playing with it :slight_smile:

jep… i have one:) works like a charm.
and now, i play arround with my first sidechain connected software-compressor under linux :))).

@duffrecords
i can open all my ardour2 sessions. beside some internal bus routings which don’t work as expected everything works fine. to rewire everything as i like it, it needs only a few mouse clicks.

@duffrecords: it will read/write files in ~/.ardour2 but other than that it is an entirely separate program (folder/directory tree, actually). It will not replace, overwrite or otherwise interfere with your Ardour2 install.

Does this integrate with an existing Ardour 2.x installation in a modular way or is it a replacement for the Ardour binary? I’m in the middle of a film score and I’m highly tempted to buy this. I do have some mono-in/stereo-out channels, though…

@duffrecords

You can always do the standard, ‘make a backup of your session file’, before you try it out in Mixbus of course.

    Seablade

Wow I’m glad to hear this. I’ll get that money and get that mixbus asap. But I also really hope that this will be a sustainable ardour feature (in ardour3 & future releases). Glory.

I also bought it works great with openSUSE 11.3 64 bits (realtime kernel)
Many Thanks.

By the way, is it possible to start mixbus with ardour3.
I have ardour3 also working on my system

@antonvdh

Assuming I understand what you meant to ask, no there is no version of Mixbus that runs on Ardour3 at the moment. You can run Mixbus as an external Mixer to Ardour(Any version) if you wish, which some people have done, but that is different from Mixbus running with A3 as the basis for the editing engine which I think is what you meant.

Seablade

eureka :).
i buy one, and hope that this also support the ardour team in a financial way.

question. is it possible to import a session from a actual ardour2 svn head version into mixbus.

wolke: Import from ardour 2 session should be possible, with some limitations. The limitations I know about are sessions that have channels that are mono input but stereo output (if you have a plugin in the channel that takes the mono input and makes it a stereo output, like some of the CAPS plugins do), or vice-versa with a stereo input and a mono output.

I have a number of session in Mixbus now that started life as Ardour 2.x sessions, but they are from mid 2009, and that’s the last time I tried to port between Ardour2 and Mixbus.

So it should be possible, and I’m sure there are workarounds that can be applied to bring an ardour 2.0-ongoing session into Mixbus. But, I reserve the right to be wrong, and YMMV, etc.

Finally! That’s really great news!

Great news! I’ll see about buying these when I get my next pay cheque.

awesome !!
i’m really happy that mixbus supports ardour, because it’s way more simple to make the people for who i work buy it (on mac for now… )
i think it’s simply a matter of look ;-(
but mixbus is still great !

Is it possible to use windows VSTs in Mixbus like in ArdourVST?

@vervelover: no, it is not. As far as I know, there are no current plans to distribute a VST enabled build of MIxbus, primarily because its functionality will depend too much on Wine, which we don’t control.

Great news for the Linux audio world!

But please everyone, don’t forget the normal donations for Ardour over the purchase of Mixbus :wink: Even more than Mixbus for Linux, I wanna see A3 soon, which is already working beautiful for a non-alpha status :slight_smile:

Benjamin