[Ardour-Users] bus strain on computer resources

[John Rigg]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 03:01:46PM -0600, will cunningham wrote:
> The busses are not so much for effects, except as mentioned here and
> in the docs when you want to apply an effect to a group of tracks
> efficiently.  The busses are for fading groups of tracks that may get
> piped into something else before the resulting group track is mixed
> into the stereo main, and monitoring the sound at different points in
> its path in the booth(seperate from the final out).
> 
> As in a live mixing board, you have the sound come in through a
> pre-amp that you can listen at that point; then you can listen to it
> pre-fade,  post-fade, if it's grouped you can listen to the group
> pre-fade or post fade, and you can listen to any set of tracks solo or
> muted without affecting what goes on with the track.

In an analogue mixer there aren't separate busses for each channel.
There are common busses to which each channel can be routed, typically
through a group assign switch or an aux send pot. What you described
in your original post was not how it's done in analogue.

I'll also echo some of the comments here about unusual techniques like
parallel compression. I think there's an overemphasis on such things
in magazines and on web sites as it makes an interesting (for some)
article. In reality they are rarely used. I've never used parallel
compression in 25+ years of sound engineering work for example, as
I've never needed it.

John