Mixbus Workflow - Mixbus as a summing mixer - Exporting Stems

[novaburst]

Hay Bladerunner it is you man how you doing, haha

Nice to see you over here dude i said to my self I know that name and he really knows a lot about mixing it is haha

have you got latest update 1970 its a killer for sure stable as hell really snappy, I was running ok any way but I sure noticed performance difference.

Also more plugins including izotope.

Hey Nova (Reaper forum right?) - I haven't got on the MB3 bandwagon yet. I'm still keeping a close eye on this forum to see where things are.

Nice going man I was saying this guy certainly knows has stuff now I know why ,
Well you do have mixbus 2 and that is good, my opinion is mixbus 3 does sound a little
Better but I suppose it's just an opinion, with the type of stuff I do mixbus is very stable with the latest 1970 release it just got better

[wolfo]

Until MB3 is more stable, I make my mixdown in my DAW , without comp or eq in the master channel. Then I import it in mixbus and use mixbus comp and eq , plus tape saturation.

Sounds good - that is what I was intending on doing but with stems for drums, guitars etc rather than a stereo master file.

Thanks for all your comments. I think that I am really using mixbus for a bit of tape saturation at the end of the day. For me it is much easier to mix the levels, edit etc in Ableton.

[stepaan]

Match MB's pan laws and your files will null with 'x' daw. According to my testing MB plays mono files 3dB quieter than stereo files. This results in a perception of a bigger stereo field (with an average multitrack that contain both stereo and mono recordings) when comparing to other daws. Once the mono files in my multitrack tests were boosted by 3dB I could get them to null. Now, once you start using MB's built in processing then, of course, yes - you get that unique MB flavour.

Does it mean, Mixbus uses -3db pan law by default?

[bladerunner]

Match MB's pan laws and your files will null with 'x' daw. According to my testing MB plays mono files 3dB quieter than stereo files. This results in a perception of a bigger stereo field (with an average multitrack that contain both stereo and mono recordings) when comparing to other daws. Once the mono files in my multitrack tests were boosted by 3dB I could get them to null. Now, once you start using MB's built in processing then, of course, yes - you get that unique MB flavour.

Does it mean, Mixbus uses -3db pan law by default?

Yes, MB's pan law is -3dB. But, what I've also found is that it plays mono files 3dB quieter than other daws. If I import a session to Reaper then import the same session to MB they sound different to one another. But, when I lower all the mono session files in Reaper by 3dB (or raise them in MB by 3dB) the sessions null. All this really means is MB is presenting it's files in an unexpected way when compared to how other DAW's do it (at least all the others I've tested). It's not 'wrong' or 'right' - just different. But, it did, at first, have the effect of making me think that MB sounded quite different to other DAW's and I attributed this to summing/saturation etc. but - due to the obsessive kinda ocd person I am - I eventually stumbled across the stereo/mono thing which proved that it wasn't what I initially thought it was.

What led to this 'testing' were 2 things - 1) to see if I could replicate the workflow in Reaper and 2) because I watched a video on youtube by some guy who announced that MB was 'better' than Reaper and proceeded to show viewers why - except he completely omitted matching his levels - he essentially played MB louder and announced it was 'better' *rolls eyes*. That's what got me a'testing

Another thing I found is that MB's peak indicators seem to be a little inaccurate - 10 playback's of a 10 second long loop of audio gave me peaks (highest peak within that 10 seconds) of -6.5,-5.9,-6.2,-6.2,-6.2,-5.9,-6.5,-6.2,-6.2,-6.5. I spotted this quite a while back and thought that it might be due to non linearities in MB's algorithms/code so I just accepted it and carried on. Now that I'm pretty sure there aren't non linearities going on at the track level it leads me to believe the meters themselves are just a little inaccurate. Another thing I noticed about the meters was that with stereo files the track AND master peak level will reflect the same (solo'ing a track) but when I do the same thing with a mono file the peak level on the master will be 3dB lower than the track - not sure why that is.

None of this post is meant to be negative about MB btw - I use and love it. I just like to get the bottom of why things sound 'different' so I can understand them better.