Hi all, first of all, I have no idea how to name this thread properly, and if this has been already discussed, please link me to the previous discussion. I'll try to explain briefly:
I've always seen Mixbus as a huge plugin on top of Ardour, and I love it, we all know the goodies, in any case, not only Harrison has thought of it this and there are coming up some interesting projects, for which I think Mixbus has always been halfway there.
Initiatives like Luna or SSL360, but specially this last one is what I'd like to address here, there are a lot of people (myself included) that for one reason or another, can't simply jump to another DAW, but still would love the benefit of mixing in a console environment such as Mixbus.
For pure sport, I've tried and succeeded in porting audio from Ableton Live to Mixbus through Jack, which is great, and today's CPUs allow for this with relatively low DSP consumption, this covers very well what SSL360 does (understood the approach is not the same, that's a different thread perhaps?), and this is great except for what's not said - what does it take to accomplish it?
Well, first I spent all day troubleshooting Jack to get my interface running independently of Mixbus, just to try and save the following connections, I've had to manually connect all channels' I/Os using QJackClt's Graph, save everything, just to start over and connect all the "cables" again once I wanted to open the session again, and no one wants to be patching all the studio cables everyday, just imagine it was hardware. xD
Long story short: it is not a simple task at the moment, and there isn't an easy automation in view to all this, not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying I haven't been able to automatize this process, and even if possible, that's the point, it shouldn't be that hard.
Back to this thread's name, would it ever be possible to develop an integrated tool that would bypass the manual routing over Jack in order to do this?
I thought of an "insert" VST3 plugin (similar to Carla's patchbay plugin) that could simply be inserted in the Host DAW (i.e. Live), then in the "insert" plugin, the user would either manually assign a Channel Number or a sort of ID, or the ID would be taken from the Host Track Name, and Mixbus could simply recognize this Insert and bring the audio from the Host, process EQ, Dynamics, Gain, Fader, LV2 (that we know are not available in other DAWs) and/or other plugins, and then send the audio back to the Host.
This way, all Mixbus would be seen from the Host as a plugin, but the Users would be mixing in Mixbus.
Added benefits over using 360:
Let me know what you think!
I've always seen Mixbus as a huge plugin on top of Ardour, and I love it, we all know the goodies, in any case, not only Harrison has thought of it this and there are coming up some interesting projects, for which I think Mixbus has always been halfway there.
Initiatives like Luna or SSL360, but specially this last one is what I'd like to address here, there are a lot of people (myself included) that for one reason or another, can't simply jump to another DAW, but still would love the benefit of mixing in a console environment such as Mixbus.
For pure sport, I've tried and succeeded in porting audio from Ableton Live to Mixbus through Jack, which is great, and today's CPUs allow for this with relatively low DSP consumption, this covers very well what SSL360 does (understood the approach is not the same, that's a different thread perhaps?), and this is great except for what's not said - what does it take to accomplish it?
Well, first I spent all day troubleshooting Jack to get my interface running independently of Mixbus, just to try and save the following connections, I've had to manually connect all channels' I/Os using QJackClt's Graph, save everything, just to start over and connect all the "cables" again once I wanted to open the session again, and no one wants to be patching all the studio cables everyday, just imagine it was hardware. xD
Long story short: it is not a simple task at the moment, and there isn't an easy automation in view to all this, not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying I haven't been able to automatize this process, and even if possible, that's the point, it shouldn't be that hard.
Back to this thread's name, would it ever be possible to develop an integrated tool that would bypass the manual routing over Jack in order to do this?
I thought of an "insert" VST3 plugin (similar to Carla's patchbay plugin) that could simply be inserted in the Host DAW (i.e. Live), then in the "insert" plugin, the user would either manually assign a Channel Number or a sort of ID, or the ID would be taken from the Host Track Name, and Mixbus could simply recognize this Insert and bring the audio from the Host, process EQ, Dynamics, Gain, Fader, LV2 (that we know are not available in other DAWs) and/or other plugins, and then send the audio back to the Host.
This way, all Mixbus would be seen from the Host as a plugin, but the Users would be mixing in Mixbus.
Added benefits over using 360:
- Transport Clock Sync (current 360 users have to minimize the console and go back to the Host to play and stop)
- Mixbus "can record" the mixing session as a live performance.
- Other Mixbus current benefits such as mix snapshots etc.
- Can't record automation - would that be fixable?
- Many more for sure, but can't think anything more important than the lack of automation at the moment.
Let me know what you think!
