Mixbus vs My Dream App (longish)

[jabney]

Here's the workflow at our (non-profit) venue:

o 24 tracks (or sometimes 26 or 28 with kluges) are recorded as .wav 48k 24bits
(these are raw files, no song markers, etc. and may be recorded using one or more of several different applications, OS's and the like)

o Talent is eager (or at least willing) to buy multitrack at nominal cost

o Talent doesn't bring a USB thumbdrive that's big enough (or that uses a compatible file system)

o Me: "No problem, I'll trim the heads and tails then convert the files to flac"

o Talent: "How long will that take? The bus leaves in 30 minutes"

o Me: "Longer than that, but I can send you the files"

o Talent: "Let me think about it, I'll get back to you"

You can probably guess how that works out. Long delays may have a place in music, but not that long. And not that kind of delay.

So what I would like is a DAW that works much faster for a limited set of tasks.

First, my dream app would sample each original track at .5 to 5 second intervals (user choice) and show what is happening in the waveform display. This behavior would continue until I tell it to stop displaying or until it reaches the end. If it reaches the end without being stopped, then it would begin again with finer grained behavior, etc.

Second, my dream app would let me simply set two edit points without moving any of the tracks. One to (roughly) define the beginning, and one to (roughly) define the end. These would be labelled: Start and End. The screen real-estate between Start and End would be selected. (The youtube tutorials for doing this would not include any other task. No comping. No effects. No nothin' except how to trim heads and tails. Nada. Zip.) Empty tracks could be designated with the Mute button.

Third, my dream app would let me export selected, non-muted tracks to one or more locations as FLAC files using the default criteria of my choice.

Naming conventions would be handled by one question (at most) and dire warnings of data loss would be avoided because the original tracks are only being read, not written to. And no music would need to be heard. I'm just trying to get rid of large white spaces.

How close is Mixbus to being able to emulate that kind of behavior? And if not Mixbus, then what else?

best,

john

[Ben@Harrison]

Mixbus's strength is its ability to mix those tracks down to stereo very quickly and export them.

Unfortunately we didn't implement "stem" export in Mixbus v2, which would allow you to quickly select a time range and export one wavefile for each of 24 tracks. That's been done for Ardour3 so it will appear in a later version of Mixbus.

Why not just give them the Mixbus session? Mixbus is inexpensive and it runs on nearly any computer ( mac, windows or linux ) that they may have.

[jabney]

...
Why not just give them the Mixbus session? Mixbus is inexpensive and it runs on nearly any computer ( mac, windows or linux ) that they may have.

Thanks for responding. And thanks to you and the Harrison team for a great sounding piece of software.

The issues we have at our small non-profit are time and diskspace (which both come down to money). In a live setting such as ours, the volunteer doing the recording may also be drafted to check wristbands or make popcorn so starting the recording well ahead of time makes sense. The only cost is a lot of whitespace at the beginning (and the time it costs to trim it later) and perhaps at the end.

To trim the header means the application has to load the whole track, delete the header then rewrite the rest of the track somewhere. And calculate a new display. And it has to do this 24 or 26 or 28 times. But we're not done yet. There's whitespace at the end too. (And that's if the person doing it can figure out how - I love Mixbus but I still haven't out how to edit on it with any degree of confidence.) And we still have a big 24 bit .wav file.

24, 26 or 28 .wav tracks at 48k 24 bits plus an .iso of AVLinux might fit on a 32 USB stick if the heads and tails were trimmed and if the band didn't play too long or play too many encores. But musicians with empty 32 Gig USB 2 drives are few and far between (and forget about 64 Gig - these are musicians on the road). 16 Gig USB sticks are a lot more common and FLAC files for a full multitracked show will usually fit on one. And if they don't have a stick-drive, 2 or 3 DVDs are cheap enough.

As for exporting tracks, I thought Mixbus was already able to:

Finally, Session->Export->Export Session to audio file will export the entire session, as you hear it, to a stereo
wav file. It is also possible to export individual track “stems” from this dialog for processing in another workstation.

I guess the frustrating thing for me is that video has had proxy editing (what I called the First step in my Dream App) for quite some time. But not audio. Some kinds of editing require being able to look at a single sample. But sometimes you just want to know if there's sound there or not.

best,

john

ps, I've been talking-up Mixbus when given the chance. Like when a band brings in their own soundperson. No takers, so far, but I'll keep trying.

[Ben@Harrison]

Well, here's a workaround that occurred to me.

Once you've made the recording, use the Range tool to select 24 tracks, for the length of one song. Then right-click on the range and choose "consolidate". This will result in 24 new wavefiles inside the session interchange folder.

Getting those files sensibly named, optionally FLAC-encoded, and copied to a USB stick is left as an exercise to the reader But some creative script-writing could make that happen automatically.

Repeat that process for each song.

If your computer is really fast (an i5 or i7) then the longest part of the process will be copying the files to a USB key.

I record a multi-act live show nearly every month. The existing waveform displays and Range tool are well-suited to locating the song start/end and range-selecting them. When asked, I make a quick 2-mix for the bands. So far nobody wants or needs the multitracks.

-Ben

[Matt]

Okay gonna somewhat hijack this thread and can start a new one if that would be better. But I'm in a similar boat.

I use another inexpensive but full featured daw to record our church services, because the "pro" one I also use has a 32 channel I/O limit and we have a 64-channel iLive. Most services are 20 channels or less, but big productions, Easter, can go over 32 pretty quick.

Anyways I then transfer the recorded wave files into the "pro" daw for editing, and right now mixing. I don't mind editing in mixbus, but is there a good way to delete the unused audio in mixbus? If so I haven't found a way. It's done easily enough in the other software, but if I could do it all in mixbus that would be ideal.

Right now my plan of going forward is to record the wave files. Edit them in the "pro" app, delete the unused audio, and export as an OMF. Import that and do the final mix in mixbus. I've played with ardour exchange and it seems to be pretty solid.

The reason being is there is only one mic needed for about 30 mins while the pastor preaches. And that leaves a lot of wasted hard drive space. Our services usually end up taking up roughly 25 GB after recording. But after editing I can get them down to 5-10 GB. That is a lot more convenient for backing up to Blu-ray. As I can get 2-3 services on one disc instead of one disc per service.

Thanks in advance.

[Ben@Harrison]

@Matt:

Mixbus is a non-destructive editor and it tries very hard to keep your original source files intact regardless of how you trim them in the editor. But, as you say, this is not helpful if disk space is a major concern.

The only way to force Mixbus to delete the unneeded audio from disk is to do this:

1) Using the Range tool (or smart mode) select a range corresponding to the track(s) and timeline that you want to keep. Right-click on the region and choose "consolidate". This will create NEW audio files that are trimmed to the correct length. This can be pretty rough-cut. You'll want some seconds of dead air at the start of each song for fade-in/out.

2) Using the object tool ( or smart mode) delete the old full-length regions.

3) Click "Session->Cleanup->Cleanup Unused Files". Then close the session, re-open it, and choose "Session->Cleanup->Flush wastebasket" ( I said that Mixbus tries really hard not to delete source files, didn't I ... )

That should leave you with only the audio you actually see in the session window on disk.

-Ben

[Matt]

Awesome!!! I will give that a try ASAP. And I do understand this isn't a common concern. As most users don't have 30+ mins of recorded silence/unnecessary ambience on 20+ tracks. But it is a space killer for sure.