Recording - September 2015 - 42

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Harrison's lovingly-built analog consoles
have been prominently used in recording
studios for decades, and the company
now offers a variety of products, both analog and digital. In recent issues we've
looked at several Harrison analog products, most recently the 832c rackmount 8channel filter (August 2014), but now it's
time to take a walk on the digital side.
Harrison's Mixbus DAW is designed
with different goals and workflow than
most other DAWs. Its early versions attracted a small but loyal following among engineers who found its strengths appealing.
With the very recent release of Version 3,
Harrison has added a number of critical
features and improved on others, making it
much more accessible to beginners and
appealing to experienced engineers.

Harrison Mixbus 3
What do you get when a famous maker of analog consoles releases a DAW?
At the time I'm writing this review, Mixbus 3
has been on the market for about four weeks.
I confess that I was among many who looked
at the requirements for getting version 2.5 up
and running, and avoided doing so because
of the hassle involved. That hassle's gone
now; Mixbus 3 is trivial to install and makes
sense from the moment you launch it. Between
that and its very affordable price, it has a
potential place in many different studios.
Because of the relatively short time
scale, this review is more of a "walking
tour" than an in-depth discussion. I'll introduce you to the basics of Mixbus and try
to point out places where it may be a
good investment for you.
Why Mixbus?
The first time you open Mixbus, you take
one look at it and say, "Oh, yes. I get it."
While there are lots of DAWs out there that
use a mixing-console paradigm, with faders
and pan pots and the like, this is often grafted onto a core function set that's primarily
devoted to manipulating audio: cutting,
pasting, rearranging, editing, crossfading,
etc. It's only after the tracks are in place that
the mixing process begins, and while a few
DAWs make a serious effort to make the
interface appealing and intuitive, there's
always a sense that you're not really working with a mixing console.
42

RECORDING September 2015

Mixbus is different; first and foremost
it's meant to be a virtual mixing console
that works like a real mixing console. It
looks like one, behaves like one... and
perhaps most critically, it sounds like one.
Before we start
Mixbus is based on the open-source
DAW Ardour, now in version 4. Using
Ardour as a set of core algorithms, the folks
at Harrison then integrated their own code,
based on many years of experience with
how an analog console should sound. The
end result is a DAW that's based on a solid
platform with years of field-testing behind it,
with a look and sonic character that is
uniquely Harrison's own. As Harrison's Ben
Loftis is fond of saying: this isn't a DAW
designed by people who make computer
programs, it's a DAW designed by people
who make mixers.
Mixbus is available in 32- and 64-bit versions for Windows XP or newer, Mac OS X
10.6.8 or newer, and Linux kernel 2.6 or
higher (preferably in an audio-centric distro
like Ubuntu Studio). In the days of versions 1
and 2, the open-source/Linux roots of Ardour
showed through in Mixbus's audio I/O to the
host computer. It required a software service
package called JACK, which allowed for a
lot of flexibility on all three platforms but could
be finicky for a non-techie to get working.

As of Mixbus 3, that's past history for the
majority of users; while JACK still works
with Mixbus and can be a very handy
thing to have, it's no longer required.
Mixbus now installs with drivers for ASIO
(Windows), Core Audio (Mac OS X), and
ALSA (Linux). That makes installation and
operation a snap; you authorize Mixbus by
dropping a text keyfile into a certain folder
on your computer, fire it up, tell it about
your hardware, and you're ready to work.
First we record and edit...
One of the two main windows in
Mixbus is the Editor Window. As a DAW,
Mixbus has to offer a way for you to look
at what you've recorded and work with it.
While it's not the primary focus of
Mixbus, the Editor Window is highly
capable and does everything most engineers will need. Note that a full channel
strip is available on the left for whichever
Track is currently selected; we'll learn
more about its features when we examine
the Mixer Window in a moment.
The top of the Canvas (the workspace)
has a list of global function tracks. In our
screenshot, we show timecode and bar
lines, Meter and Tempo tracks, Loop markers, and Location markers; many other
types of information can be shown here,
such as range indicators and CD markers.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2015