Harrison Mixbus 3 is coming today!

[Dearly Deported]

IMO, if they want to make a serious attempt at bringing a new DAW to market, they need to start from scratch. At this point it could even be easier than trying to fix all the issues with the current Mixbus.

Mixbus is a great concept with a good layout, plus the SOUND...but with the issues it still has at V3, it feels like a product put out by some struggling indie devs, not a respectable company like Harrison. I know hardware is their focus, but if you're going to do something, I say do it right. I want Mixbus to be around for a while, not fall by the wayside and become abandonware due to its reputation.

[LawrenceF]

IMO, if they want to make a serious attempt at bringing a new DAW to market, they need to start from scratch.

I'll politely disagree there. They "need" to do whatever they feel is best for their company, while having all of the relevant information that pertains to all of that, information we don't have.

Their business model is not to please everyone, it's to make wise decisions for the company. Is MixBus riding on the back or Ardour a "wise" decision for Harrison? We don't personally know that one way or another.

Bottom line, if a product is just not what you like, don't buy it. Telling others how to run their businesses doesn't often result in anything useful or productive. If they had started from scratch, instead of complaining about the current stuff KVR would be complaining about all the things it doesn't do yet.

I personally disagree with their no demo policy but it's not my place to imply that I know what's best for Harrison the company. Doing so would be somewhat presumptuous. Short of maybe being a Harrison stockholder, it doesn't matter to me that much anyway.

[clintmartin]

Harrison service is excellent! I was having an issue (which turned out to be entirely on my end) and Ben has has spent a lot of time with me getting things figured out. Mixbus 3 is now working very well here.

[MarlaPodolski]

They needed a way to inject their proprietary code into an existing code base without all of the legal hassles involved with code sharing. They actually approached Cockos about doing it there with Reaper, but the legal challenges were too formidable, ...

I never read before the whys and wherefores of its creation, so your explaing this was very interesting.

HOWEVER (and Wherein and Wherefore), the minute I read the words "legal" and "legal hassles" I had to let out a heavy AHAHH!. Anytime you have, as you said, potential "legal hassles" ruling their thoughts and the day, instead of music and quality of product, you should expect second rate and possible failure. And this is the result we are looking at.

Even you went on to say how you agree that it;s buggy in Windows and that you use it for little, other than mixing stems. I agree about the console sound thing, but, really, what good is a DAW that you actually can't use as a DAW?

[pekbro]

I have had absolutely no problems running Mixbus 2 or 3 on windows, aside from a few absent features.
I think it sounds great...

-Cheers

[Grizzellda]

Maybe Harrison got with the Ardour group to have a foundation to start from, to get a product out there. Then invest some money into the project, maybe hire some professionals to help out until it becomes a more mature product. That would be cool. As I said earlier, I like Mixbuss & would like to see it as a robust, solid application.

But I think I would prefer it as a straightforward audio mixing program with their unique DSP. Now they are adding virtual instruments, etc...and that may not help stability.

By the way, in my last post I wasn't trying to "tell anyone how to run their business". Simply exploring the idea that the demo policy is not with the times!

[Dearly Deported]

I'll politely disagree there. They "need" to do whatever they feel is best for their company, while having all of the relevant information that pertains to all of that, information we don't have.

Their business model is not to please everyone, it's to make wise decisions for the company. Is MixBus riding on the back or Ardour a "wise" decision for Harrison? We don't personally know that one way or another.

Bottom line, if a product is just not what you like, don't buy it. Telling others how to run their businesses doesn't often result in anything useful or productive. If they had started from scratch, instead of complaining about the current stuff KVR would be complaining about all the things it doesn't do yet.

I personally disagree with their no demo policy but it's not my place to imply that I know what's best for Harrison the company. Doing so would be somewhat presumptuous. Short of maybe being a Harrison stockholder, it doesn't matter to me that much anyway.

I bought it on sale, and I do like it. It runs pretty well and sounds great. But that's been my personal experience. Obviously this DAW has problems, and hopefully Harrison fixes them. Just because it runs fine for me doesn't mean I'm going to discredit people it doesn't run well for or tell them that they shouldn't have bought it.

I like how, according to you, we're not allowed to have opinions on what Harrison should do unless we work for the company. I guess you're one of those people who feel no one should complain about the president unless they've previously been president themselves? And somehow it's a smart move for Harrison to be the only company that doesn't offer a demo of their DAW? Really?

[BenLoftis]

IMO, if they want to make a serious attempt at bringing a new DAW to market, they need to start from scratch."

Interesting. When we talked to people a few years ago, the LAST thing they wanted was yet another proprietary workstation with its own session format, etc.

Because of our choice there are now 3 workstations ( Ardour, Harrison Mixbus and Waves Tracks Live ) that share the same session format. And improvements can be shared among all 3. This is a big deal.

Furthermore, everything that we improve in Ardour is available for future developers to learn from, whether they are at Harrison or not. We are taking this in a much more serious and mature direction than DAWs in the past.

Thanks for all the great input on this forum! I am watching it very carefully.

Best,
-Ben

[LawrenceF]

Even you went on to say how you agree that it;s buggy in Windows and that you use it for little, other than mixing stems. I agree about the console sound thing, but, really, what good is a DAW that you actually can't use as a DAW?

What you say would make sense only if you viewed it from a really narrow perspective. For example, let me give you my daw purchase history...

- Bought ACID before Cubase did all that. Bought if only for stretching and pitching and manipulating clips. Didn't give a rat's patoot how good a daw it was otherwise.

- Bought FL Studio only for it's pattern abilities. Still don't give a rat's pitoot how good it is or not at anything else because I don't use it for anything else.

- Bought PT MBox only to open PT sessions. Didn't have an "approved system" and didn't give a rat's pitoot how well it ran Vi's or anything else. I bought it to answer that question in the affirmative... "Yes, I have PT.", and to open PT sessions to stem the tracks out to work in (at that time) Cubase.

None of those products were ever intended (for me) to be used as a DAW for production. I only bought them because they offered other tools my other products didn't have. I got good use out of all of them.

Moral: Not everybody buys a DAW to do everything listed on the mfg's marketing page.

I bought MixBus to ... erhm... "Mix", and that's all I ever use it for.

[LawrenceF]

I like how, according to you, we're not allowed to have opinions on what Harrison should do unless we work for the company. I guess you're one of those people who feel no one should complain about the president unless they've previously been president themselves? And somehow it's a smart move for Harrison to be the only company that doesn't offer a demo of their DAW? Really?

No, you misunderstand. Maybe you're just young, no idea, but it's not offering an opinion, it's "how" you offer an opinion. There's nothing wrong with offering opinions. My opinion (as I stated earlier) is they should have a demo. That's a far cry from...

"WTF were they thinking! That was really dumb! Why on earth would anyone do that?!?! Wow, they really f**ked up!" (not that you personally said that, but that's KVR host forum in general )

That's not an "opinion", that's a judgement, from someone who (let me guess) has never actually run an international software company or had to deal with such complex things on a daily basis. But that's the net where there are 2,000,000 back seat drivers who know better how to do everything, except most of them never actually (themselves) do anything like that, they just tell others who - are - doing it how they could do it better.

In other words, observe the golden rule and be nice. Don't imply that you could do it better or that someone else is dumb, maybe just say "I disagree with that decision." and leave it at that? Or maybe before judging, just ask a company or developer "why" they came to that decision, to better understand their reasoning before rushing to judge.

So...

IMO, if they want to make a serious attempt at bringing a new DAW to market, they need to start from scratch.

How could you know their need? Have you done an in depth study or survey of the market? Do you have personal experience in delivering software to a mass market? Do you know how much it would cost to develop a new daw from scratch over like, 3-5 years? Do you even know if MixBus is a financially profitable endeavor for Harrison currently? Of course we don't know that. And the comment implies that you know more about that than the entirety of Harrison, a decades old audio company.

I would not call MixBus a "not serious" attempt at bringing a daw to market. Looks pretty serious to me. They just still have some tech challenges to work through... as does Ardour, which is buggy enough for enough people on the Windows platform.

I kinda view it as a bit of a boutique product, though it doesn't have a boutique price. I don't personally think it's intended to challenge Cubase and Logic and similar in the Daw Wars... if that's what you meant by "serious".

[MarlaPodolski]

What you say would make sense only if you viewed it from a really narrow perspective. ...

Moral: Not everybody buys a DAW to do everything listed on the mfg's marketing page.

From the narrow perspective of thinking a DAW should be capable of being a DAW, I guess.

I expect that no one, certainly not myself, ever used every function that any DAW offers. That's just silly talk; your ad obscurium derails the reasonable issues of discussion about the facts of Mixbuss' poor performance for most users.

After following the several painful threads of users' generally bad experiences, I'm just entirely grateful I never got tangled up into this tedious and time wasting "DAW", "mixer" or whatever we're calling it now.

[JohnD71651]

At least for me, the latest interim release of Mixbus 3 (1508) is usable but still

• very buggy
• performing badly (needs a 1024 buffer size as opposed to the 128 I can use in Sonar, Reaper and Mulab)

And yes, of course people can personally comment on whether releasing buggy software without a demo is a sound business strategy or not. I can't see how anyone could be offended by such comments. Harrison should have done better QA of the Window's port. If they had the same level of quality control for their hardware consoles, nobody would buy them.

That being said, they are busy working and there are reasons for hope that the future 3.x releases will become stable and halfway efficient.

[Dearly Deported]

My positions are simple LawrenceF.

1. A DAW should work as advertised.
2. A DAW should work as advertised ESPECIALLY when there is no demo.
3. Maybe building your DAW on a platform with known issues wasn't a wise move.
4. If the DAW is known to have issues with a significant number of users, it will not be taken seriously.

You can say I'm young or ignorant because I've never run a Fortune 500 company and punctuate your posts with all the smarmy emoticons you want. Mixbus is advertised as a DAW, the fact that you only use it to mix is irrelevant, as is your DAW purchase history. You can't actually refute anything I've said, so you try to move the argument away from the issues.

As I said before, I like Harrison Mixbus. But it doesn't work for many people. If Harrison can fix it, great. Hopefully their decision to build on Ardour works out in the long run.

[LawrenceF]

I certainly didn't call you ignorant. That would be rude.

I referred to youth because younger people are more likely to see the world as they want it to be, not how it really is. It was more suggesting that if you were the person at Harrison making that final decision, after having looked over all of the relevant facts and concerns and costs and opinions of your internal advisors, you might have also green-lit the exact same thing you say they shouldn't have done. Impossible to know because (obviously) we don't have all of that information.

It might simply be that the people who control the purse stings there just flat out said... "No. We simply aren't going to fund development costs for a brand new audio workstation. Find another way."

And while Ardour obviously has some issues, it not being a commercial enterprise and afaik, having no full time Windows developers, it still apparently works for enough people as advertised. It's biggest issues seem to show up across other platforms. It may well be that the best case for running it is on Linux or Unix (OSX), not Windows.

What puzzles me is - given the large diversity of great daws to choose from - why would anyone spend more than 10 minutes worrying about it? It's an $80 daw. If it doesn't work as well for you or I as they advertise, we should just stop buying it. No biggie.

There's tons of other daws to use so even if what you say is true, it's still not a major issue.

And please excuse my rather lengthy last couple of replies. I have an occasional CompyFox moment.

[Batty]

We are producing in our Studio with Cubase 8.5 and lots of perfectly adjusted vst plugins for our work, but are considering to switch to another DAW because of some recent instabilities. But without a Demoversion - how can we know about the most important part beforehand: stability and compatibility with our hardware and plugins?

Without being able to test, I must say we have to pass, although Mixbus looks incredible and to me personally most incredible compared to most other DAWs. I love the looks of Mixbus - but there are other things even more important, but they can't be considered without a demo - or would the guys from Harrison come to us personally (without additional costs ) to make their program on our machines production ready? Sorry we won't switch, only to switch again - loose money - and commit/loose our precious time for learning only to find out that it's for nothing.