I bought Mixbus with the aim of getting a DAW that I could become familiar with in Windows and then trying to move to Linux.
First problem was that I have Ubuntu on a netbook and Ardour won’t fit on the screen. I’ve seen the posts elsewhere. I will set up another machine later.
Meanwhile I have Mixbus running on my Windows 7 machine and am finding it OK if a little basic.
Then my son appeared with his Windows 8 Acer tablet with a keyboard and we tried it on that to see how a touch screen would work.
We found the screen too small for any real work and it appeared that, while the touch screen was multi-touch, Mixbus and a
Ardour were only single touch. Can anyone confirm that this is correct, or do I need to try to get him to persevere?
Billaboard: it isn’t Mixbus or Ardour that is single touch, per se, but the GUI toolkit we use. Version 2.X of GTK+ doesn’t support multitouch.
That said, switching to multi-touch generally requires changes in apps as well, often very deep changes. From my reading/watching so far, I’d say that the idea that you can just take a kbd+mouse+MIDI+OSC controllable app and make it work intuitively with multitouch is a bit misguided. It can work … sort of. But in general, design for multi-touch is pretty different, different even from just design for touch.
Thanks, Paul. That is useful to know. I don’t think this will matter to most people, it’s just that I come from a live to air broadcast mixing background that makes me familiar with many fingers on faders.
I have quite a large collection of audio interfaces - mainly usb for use with laptops, but I do use a Tascam FW-1884 and a Frontier Alphatrack as control surfaces with the laptops. It will be interesting to see if I can get any of this to work with Linux when the time comes.
Billaboard: a device such as this will provide many faders for many fingers to control Ardour3 (and future versions of Mixbus - less so with the current release). You may not like the price, so you could consider other similar devices such as the original Mackie Control or the incredibly cheap Behringer BCF and BCR series.
Touch screens are generally not a direct replacement for specifically designed control surfaces.
