Suite aux échanges sur Mixbus Harrison, j'ai contacté ben Loftis, très à l'écoute et voila ce qu'il donne comme explications sur le retrait de la démo du soft. (copie d'un échange de mails avec Ben Loftis il y à quelques minutes)
Je n'avais pas noté qu'il tournait aussi sur PPC ...
Hi Everyone!
I hope I can answer some of your questions about Mixbus.
Regarding compatibility:
Because Mixbus uses open-source libraries that must work on multiple platforms, we are able to provide wider compatibility than most other DAW projects.
On OSX, Mixbus works from 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). We support both PPC and Intel computers.
On Windows, Mixbus works from XP Pro to 7, on Intel and AMD computers.
Regarding a demo:
Converting to a new DAW is a major project. It takes many days or weeks of learning a new workflow, and the minor cost of purchase ( currently as low as $49 with the subscription plan) is minor when compared with a user's time. When a customer purchases Mixbus, she funds Harrison so we can help her get over any initial problems and answer questions so she can become proficient quickly. A demo was not conducive to this kind of relationship.
Regarding customization / user contributions:
Some DAWs allow for deep customization by the users, but you must be aware that the software's IP is proprietary to its owner, and its owner can be purchased or otherwise choose to stop trading ( http://www.zdnet.com/users-petition-avid-to-sell-sibelius-music-software-arm-7000002271/ ). Mixbus is different. Mixbus uses Ardour, which is open-source (GPL-licensed) software in its design. Any changes made to the GPL'd portion of the software is made available for everyone, forever. For example, if you spend many months developing a feature for Ardour, and later versions of Ardour break your feature, you can recompile and distribute Ardour so that it continues to support your feature. This also applies to the session files and all of your user data: Your data is kept in an open-source format so that if you have to recover a song 25 years from now, you have the file specification as well as the entire source code for the program that loaded the session, at that time (!) This should be of intense interest to people who want their music to have value sometime far in the future. But most people seem content to lock their precious data into proprietary formats. I don't know why.
I hope this helps you understand what makes Mixbus different!
Best Regards,
Ben Loftis
Harrison Consoles
---------- Nouveau message ajouté à 19h27 ---------- Le message précédent a été envoyé à 17h49 ----------
Compléments d'info par Ben Loftis sur le "pourquoi du son", réponse par "le comment", ce qui est en effet plus adéquat. Je pense transposable à chaque DAW, en fonction de l'expertise de chaque équipe.
Mixbus est ce qu'il est si j'ai bien compris, parce qu'il est basé sur Ardour mais aussi parce qu'il y a un feedback permanent entre les devs de MH et ceux qui construisent, dans la même société, les consoles Harrison. Toutes proportions gardées (comment en effet comparer un DAW + une carte son comme la mienne, et une console à 100 000 dollars? Tout ne se joue pas bien sur sur le seul software), il y a implémentation d'une technologie dans l'autre et la recherche d'une convergence.
Regarding the sound: The problem is that everyone expects a simple, clear answer why it sounds better. But this is impossible.
In digital processing, there are many inherent problems: aliasing, clipping, quantization noise and zipper noise, for example. These artifacts are arguably more bothersome, even at lower levels, than analog recording artifacts.
The goal is to pass the signal through the digital system in a way that avoids these artifacts. The techniques used are widely known to DSP engineers ... dither, staged summing, parameter ramping, etc.
However most DSP engineers only get to experiment with a few products, with a few collaborators of questionable abilities, in rooms of questionable acoustics. Our engineers have been able to develop multiple generations of analog and digital systems, on high-profile projects, with mixing engineers of the highest caliber in the most fantastic rooms available.
Furthermore, we have an opportunity to compare old designs and studio workflows with the more modern techniques. This is where we noticed the effect of tape saturation in the traditional recording workflow. It's not an effect ..... it serves an important stage in the recording, which is soft-clipping the loud instantaneous transients which are not important in the overall product, but have a significant effect on following processing such as compression/limiting. It has to be approached holistically, which is very hard to achieve with a purely plugin-based system.
Mixbus isn't the best mixer we can make. You have to spend over $100,000 for that. But the same people who designed the big mixers for many years have incorporated some of those seemingly insignificant, but collectively important, techniques into the design of Mixbus.
In other words, the techniques must be applied _appropriately for the product_, the techniques used in Mixbus might make no sense in another product. I hope this makes it clear why a simple answer is not possible.
Best,
-Ben
Je n'avais pas noté qu'il tournait aussi sur PPC ...
Hi Everyone!
I hope I can answer some of your questions about Mixbus.
Regarding compatibility:
Because Mixbus uses open-source libraries that must work on multiple platforms, we are able to provide wider compatibility than most other DAW projects.
On OSX, Mixbus works from 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). We support both PPC and Intel computers.
On Windows, Mixbus works from XP Pro to 7, on Intel and AMD computers.
Regarding a demo:
Converting to a new DAW is a major project. It takes many days or weeks of learning a new workflow, and the minor cost of purchase ( currently as low as $49 with the subscription plan) is minor when compared with a user's time. When a customer purchases Mixbus, she funds Harrison so we can help her get over any initial problems and answer questions so she can become proficient quickly. A demo was not conducive to this kind of relationship.
Regarding customization / user contributions:
Some DAWs allow for deep customization by the users, but you must be aware that the software's IP is proprietary to its owner, and its owner can be purchased or otherwise choose to stop trading ( http://www.zdnet.com/users-petition-avid-to-sell-sibelius-music-software-arm-7000002271/ ). Mixbus is different. Mixbus uses Ardour, which is open-source (GPL-licensed) software in its design. Any changes made to the GPL'd portion of the software is made available for everyone, forever. For example, if you spend many months developing a feature for Ardour, and later versions of Ardour break your feature, you can recompile and distribute Ardour so that it continues to support your feature. This also applies to the session files and all of your user data: Your data is kept in an open-source format so that if you have to recover a song 25 years from now, you have the file specification as well as the entire source code for the program that loaded the session, at that time (!) This should be of intense interest to people who want their music to have value sometime far in the future. But most people seem content to lock their precious data into proprietary formats. I don't know why.
I hope this helps you understand what makes Mixbus different!
Best Regards,
Ben Loftis
Harrison Consoles
---------- Nouveau message ajouté à 19h27 ---------- Le message précédent a été envoyé à 17h49 ----------
Compléments d'info par Ben Loftis sur le "pourquoi du son", réponse par "le comment", ce qui est en effet plus adéquat. Je pense transposable à chaque DAW, en fonction de l'expertise de chaque équipe.
Mixbus est ce qu'il est si j'ai bien compris, parce qu'il est basé sur Ardour mais aussi parce qu'il y a un feedback permanent entre les devs de MH et ceux qui construisent, dans la même société, les consoles Harrison. Toutes proportions gardées (comment en effet comparer un DAW + une carte son comme la mienne, et une console à 100 000 dollars? Tout ne se joue pas bien sur sur le seul software), il y a implémentation d'une technologie dans l'autre et la recherche d'une convergence.
Regarding the sound: The problem is that everyone expects a simple, clear answer why it sounds better. But this is impossible.
In digital processing, there are many inherent problems: aliasing, clipping, quantization noise and zipper noise, for example. These artifacts are arguably more bothersome, even at lower levels, than analog recording artifacts.
The goal is to pass the signal through the digital system in a way that avoids these artifacts. The techniques used are widely known to DSP engineers ... dither, staged summing, parameter ramping, etc.
However most DSP engineers only get to experiment with a few products, with a few collaborators of questionable abilities, in rooms of questionable acoustics. Our engineers have been able to develop multiple generations of analog and digital systems, on high-profile projects, with mixing engineers of the highest caliber in the most fantastic rooms available.
Furthermore, we have an opportunity to compare old designs and studio workflows with the more modern techniques. This is where we noticed the effect of tape saturation in the traditional recording workflow. It's not an effect ..... it serves an important stage in the recording, which is soft-clipping the loud instantaneous transients which are not important in the overall product, but have a significant effect on following processing such as compression/limiting. It has to be approached holistically, which is very hard to achieve with a purely plugin-based system.
Mixbus isn't the best mixer we can make. You have to spend over $100,000 for that. But the same people who designed the big mixers for many years have incorporated some of those seemingly insignificant, but collectively important, techniques into the design of Mixbus.
In other words, the techniques must be applied _appropriately for the product_, the techniques used in Mixbus might make no sense in another product. I hope this makes it clear why a simple answer is not possible.
Best,
-Ben
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