[Ardour-Users] the route parameters window

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday, December 06, 2011 11:38:51 PM Al Thompson wrote:
> How much does mixbus differ from Ardour in terms of performance and
> reliability?

Mixbus 2 looks quite a bit different from vanilla Ardour.  Also, the DSP plugin that does all the amazing mix magic takes quite a bit of CPU, so you'll need more horsepower for a given number of tracks.

Figure a dual core 2GHz or better processor (or, if it's a Xeon system a 2.5-3.0 GHz Netburst or 2GHz Core/Core2-based multiple CPU or core) as an absolute minimum for a usable box.  I personally have a 1.42GHz dual processor G4 mirror-drive-door Mac running OS X 10.4.11 (that's the fastest G4 made) and it is just barely able to keep up with four to six tracks, and the UI is painfully slow, but it can be made to work without xruns.  For a G5 Mac you'd need at least a dual 1.8GHz (IIRC; I don't have a G5 of any speed to compare, just going by the fact that the G4 is a tad more efficient at a given clock speed than the G5, somewhat like the Pentium 3 (and the Pentium M and Core families) is more effiecient than the Pentium 4 (Netburst) at a given clock speed).

Plain Ardour with few plugins can get by with less.  But with the Harrison DSP plugin you don't need a lot of other typical plugins (EQ, compression, limit, and a few others) so it may balance out for your use case.