I have a silly question. I want to extend my audio software with some professional and commercial plugins. My research brought me to the following two solutions at the moment:
OvertoneDSP Workstation
or
Mixbus DAW & Mixbus Plugin essential bundle for GVerb+ (and later perhaps x42 plugin…)
At the moment I liked the OvertoneDSP stuff a little bit more. Especially the FC-70 Limiter is great.
What worries me a little bit, is that I don’t know how the Linux support of OvertoneDSP will progress? And this is very important for me!!! Particularly I have some troubles with the new OpenGL interface of the plugins…
On the other hand I see that Harrisson supports Ardour very much I think. But the handling is not easy for me at the moment. And I love the sound of OvertoneDSP a little bit more at the moment…
Therefore I would like to hear your existimations and experiences.
Thanks for all of your answers. I think I will make a mix between Mixbus/GVerb+ and some OvertoneDSP plugins to begin with which I want to expand gradually. More than 8 busses I will not need for my recordings, so that the limitations that meefchaloin writes about, doesn’t matter for me…
One thing I still must say: The support of OvertoneDSP is simply fantastic. As said I had a problem with one plugin. Yesterday the developer of the plugin wrote me, today it is solved. Incredibility!!! I never experienced such a great support. And the products are awesome, too!!!
After playing with Mixbus over the last few days I would personally say go for the Overtone plugins. I really like the EQ and compressors on each channel in Mixbus, it saves quite a bit of time if you need to process a lot of tracks, especially as Ardour cannot load chains of plugins, but it has some (for me) severe routing limitations. If you have a stereo track panned to one side and create an aux bus to send it to then the panning information is lost when it is sent to the aux bus. This even happens when sending an audio track to another audio track.
So, from what I can tell, you’re more or less forced to use the built in Mixbus busses which might be ok for some people but becomes a pain for me. I work on 50+ takes of doubled vocals so I like to create sub groups of the doubles so I can process them together but Mixbus makes this impossible. I’m not even how you would be able to mix a full band, especially considering you are apparently supposed to use the Mixbus busses for groups of tracks and for fx returns (the returns I regularly use would almost max out the number of Mixbus DAW’s busses). It’s a real shame because other than that it is a nice polished experience and I would have bought it in a flash if it did not unnecessarily strip away the flexibility that Ardour has.
The Overtone plugins are very high quality and have beautiful GUIs, every plugin available is a gem. The only thing they lack compared to using Mixbus would be tape saturation (I think one of the compressors does have this though?). I hope one day they will offer a dedicated plugin to do this.
Dear Mike,
oh, thanks for your eMail. I havn’t seen it yet, when writing this forum posting…
Thanks for looking into my problem. This is really great. I will write you a eMail soon.
Best wishes,
Max
I think it is possible to get great results with only Mixbus/MB32C and the Harrison Plugins but I personally prefer a mixture. I love the Mixbus EQ’s and Reverbs, and prefer the compression of OverToneDSP because I have a lot of years of experience with their ‘linuxDSP’ predecessors and visually can dial in what I want very quickly and once you’ve tasted Mike’s great Pultec emulation on a Kick drum it’s hard to go back. Finally for final mastering I’m more a fan of U-he’s Satin and Presswerk than Harrison’s master limiting or OverTone’s FC-70.
It’s really a matter of ears and opinion. Truthfully what you’re getting for the cost of Mixbus and a handpicked selection of the other commercial Linux plugins is a World Class recording, mixing and mastering setup that doesn’t have to take a back seat to anything else on any other platform and is quite affordable.
Particularly I have some troubles with the new OpenGL interface of the plugins...
I have personally sent you a reply to your support request regarding that issue - I am looking into it, but it is very specific to your combination of distribution, drivers, chipset and (quite possibly libc)