[Ardour-Users] Harrison Mixbus-

[Lamar Owen]

On Sunday, January 16, 2011 02:43:11 pm david headon wrote:
> Are there any list members currently using Harrison Mixbus?
> 
> I have been given unlimited loan  of a Mac G5 tower and was hoping to use Mixbus 
> for its added functionality .
> If list members could submit their experiences if any, it would help me greatly.

Hey, good morning.

I have used Mixbus on an older G4 PowerMAC (Mirror Drive Doors, Firewire 800 motherboard), dual 1.42GHz and lots of RAM, and my experience is that that is the lowest end box where Mixbus is even usable.  The channel strip/mixer LADSPA plugin that gives Mixbus its sound takes significant processor resources; you won't even want to try it unless you have at least two CPUs or one dual-core CPU on the G5.  What's the specs on the G5?

There is an endianness issue with the peak files in the session on PPC (waveforms aren't displayed properly, at least with Mixbus 1.0), but after deleting them Mixbus rebuilds them correctly.  I've not updated on the PPC box since I have an Intel setup with a Core 2 Duo that works very well.  But I might do so just to see if the newer versions are any heavier or lighter on the CPU.

Bottom line, again, is that a dual 1.42GHz G4 is just about the absolute bottom end machine that can run Mixbus, and it's not smooth on that hardware, somewhat jerky and the GTK GUI lags a bit.  You have to tweak the JACK buffer sizes to get it to work reliably even then.