I recently followed up an ad on Facebook - very good offer on Harrison Mixbus DAW. The GUI is almost identical to Ardour! So, despite the tempting price I downloaded Ardour5. I have tried this before, but, being a real recording newbie, found it too complicated. Now I understand a bit more about inputs, outputs, buses etc, Ardour is making a lot more sense. I would much rather subscribe to open-source development than buy from a software company. So, are there any links to Mixbus? Does the actual software (behind the GUI) differ between to 2 programs?
I have a Sony Vaio laptop running latest Linux Mint and I record voice and acoustic instruments through an M-audio USB interface. Ardour works perfectly with that.
Harrison Mixbus is built on Ardour, and Harrison Consoles does contribute to the development of Ardour, several features came from Mixbus to Ardour for instance. So there is a close working relationship between the devs of Ardour and the Harrison Consoles devs.
The differences come to the DSP that comes with Mixbus, which is both limiting and more efficient for certain workflows. Particularly if destined for 2 channel output, Mixbus is a strong choice, you will get a compressor and EQ on each track, a compressor, EQ, and saturation on the mixbusses, and all that plug a limiter on the master. On top of this these processes are already tweaked so that some gainstaging aspects are taken care of for you, and the more limited focus allows most people to work much faster due to the built in DSP and already existant routing.
However if you are aiming for more than 2 channel output, Mixbus is not the best choice for you right now.
Yes those exports or others that require more than two channels (For instance working with ambisonics you can have an arbitrary number of output channels).
can you explain the exact benefits of using arour over mixbus for this topic? is there a document describing this, as i wasn’t aware of this (using mostly 32c for mixdown duties mostly). Thanks once again!
Re: Cannot do 5.1 etc. I would disagree with this, you CAN do it, but there is no built in support for that style of panning, so it requires a lot of manual work to do (Have to manually create busses and handle your routing specifically and very carefully). But for most people’s purposes you are figuratively correct.