Harrison DAW on linux!

I was seeing some videos at youtube and a Harrison ad call my attention. They have been developing some DAWs and from what I´m reading it support linux.

http://harrisonconsoles.com/site/mixbus.html
http://harrisonconsoles.com/site/mixbus32c.html

It is a new alternative to Rosegarden and Ardour. Maybe i should give linux a new try 

Harrison MixBus is actually built on top of Ardour and is completely cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux).  There are some pretty big limitations in using MixBus if you've gotten used to using a "modern" DAW in regards to the busing structure and aux sends.  It definitely works like an 8 bus mixer with arbitrary number of input channels.  I found it difficult (even impossible) to do some of the things that have become part of my workflow in Reaper in regards to grouping/busing/parallel processing.

It's very nice having built in dynamics/EQ on the channels, and tape emulation on the groups, but for anything approaching modern mixing techniques, it's just not practical.

There's another version of Harrison DAW based on the Harrison 32 series console that's different/better than MixBus 3. 

Looks a lot like a software version of my AKAI DPS24 which is getting a little long in the tooth. I have downloaded the Linux free demo to try it out.

Cheers

Ian

Thejames,
I'm using Ardour and Mixbus but don't know any other DAW. Can you please tell me what would be a more "modern approach to mixing"? How is the track/bus (kind of analog) a limiting factor?

Wouldn't a bigger issue be sound card drivers? Not sure many manufactures of hardware support linux

john12ax7 said:

Wouldn't a bigger issue be sound card drivers? Not sure many manufactures of hardware support linux

Click to expand...

Probably a lot more than you think. There are plenty of drivers for the Mac and, as OS/9 has the same roots as Linux, it's not too hard to make Linux versions.

Cheers

Ian

Well, drivers are an issue, even though they might be not so hard to programm.
I'm using RME products (HDSPe AES and MADIface) with SSL converters without problems. Real stable, but they are the only choice.

john12ax7 said:

Wouldn't a bigger issue be sound card drivers? Not sure many manufactures of hardware support linux

Click to expand...

Most PCI cards have support in the kernel. A lot of firewire audio interfaces are supported via ffado. And all USB audio class compliant interfaces just work on Linux.

There is an experimental, unsupported build of REAPER for Linux available for download from Cockos. And some are running this DAW under Wine.

What's lacking for audio to really take off, are plugins. Very few commercial VST's are available.

And what's often a PITA, is the lack of documentation. And that has gotten a lot worse since Pulse audio became the more-or-less standard user interface for the audio system. In contrast with most other Linux software, Pulse isn't very stable either. It's OK for 2 channel MP3 playback, but once you need to track more than 2 channels, it's mostly useless.

Wow....I missed the follow up question.

So here's a for instance...

I will typically take the snare top/snare bottom channels and feed them to a third channel (via aux sends) for heavy processing (tight gate, heavy compression, radical EQ).  Then I took all three channels and tucked them under a single fader (alternatively easily done with VCA/DCA groups in MixBus).

My drum routing in general can look pretty crazy.

Drum Master
  Drum verb
  Drum parallel crush
  Drum submaster
        Kick fader
            Kick inside
            Kick outside
            Kick sample
        Snare Fader
            Snare Top
            Snare bottom
            Snare crush
            Snare verb?
        Toms
              T1 - T(x)
        Hat
        Ride
        OH L
        OH R
        Room L
        Room R

And whatever else.  There could be quite a bit of other crap in there too.  Tracks to busses, busses to busses, tracks to auxes, tracks to tracks...The DAW makes this somewhat easy to do (especially Reaper).  MixBus by design gives you an unlimited channel, 8 bus mixer with a few auxes.  It's not exactly flexible and the things I did to work around the limitations within MixBus ended up breaking the rules of MixBus.

I checked out of MixBus in the early stages of V3.  I thought 32C looked to be a really good improvement, but I wasn't going to spend the money to find out.  I have no idea what V4 brings to the table.  As I said, I checked out of MixBus pretty early on and maybe some of my routing gripes are fixed in the new V4 version.

I mostly use ardour for mixing, but AFAIK you have unlimited buses/auxes in mixbus.
The limitation of 8 mixbuses is for those with the built in processing, if I'm not totally mistaken.