Introducing Mixbus And The Ardour3 Alpha

Dave Phillips — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour's native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies - see the advertisements on the site - and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour's audio capabilities and Harrison's unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.

Figure 1. Harrison's Mixbus For Linux. (Full-size)

Getting The Goods

I'll get the potential downside out of the way: Mixbus is a closed-source application that sells for real money ($79 US). However, it is also reliant upon to and materially supportive of the Ardour project, and a portion of your Mixbus purchase goes to fund Ardour's development.

Mixbus can be purchased from the Harrison Web site. After retrieving the tarball unpack it in your home directory, enter your new Mixbus-xxx subdirectory, and run the install.sh program (as root user). Desktop and menu icons will be installed for easily launching the program, and once the program's installed it's ready for use.

Harrison's recommended minimal hardware requirements for Mixbus for Linux include a dual-core CPU and 1G memory. I tested the program on two machines, a laptop with a dual-core AMD Turion-X2 and a desktop box with a single-core AMD 3800+ clocked at 2.4 GHz. Both machines use nVidia graphics chipsets that are roughly equivalent in performance. Mixbus runs on the 3800, but its screen redraws are struggling to keep up. Audio processing sounds fine on the single-core machine and created no xruns at fairly low latency. However, the sluggish graphics adversely affects the enjoyment and productive use of the Mixbus user interface. By comparison, the laptop's video performance was noticeably better. I can say that Mixbus will run on the 3800, but I will not recommend a single-core box. For best performance heed Harrison's advice and use a multi-core machine.

The Mixer

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An Ecology Of Ardour

Dave Phillips — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:56:06 +0000

by Dave Phillips

This article is a brief report on some of the current news and activities going on in the world of Ardour, Paul Davis's superb open-source digital audio workstation (DAW). What began as a labor of love has become one of the most significant projects in the world of Linux audio and in the more general world of Linux applications development.

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