Some very insightfull comments guys. Thanks.
Thats really odd about the eq10q, ive never experienced any problems with it. i mainly use KX studio and it just works, no pops clicks or lock ups. When i use it i try and not use “too much” . My profession is live sound engineering has been ever since i left college (20 years ago) and no to well how over EQ can cause problems.
Now that i think about it, ive came across the same kind of problems on a couple of digital consoles and also on some anologue consoles where they just dont sound as good as you want.
I may just ditch the eq10q plugin and go back to a more traditional channel type eq and keep the graphic eq for overall mix EQ.
As for the tape saturation, i did try adding tape saturation in the same projection in ardour 3 and didnt like it. To be honest i wasnt really too sure about the tape saturation in mixbus on the project i was using. As everyone has said, it added a percieved loudness and the track i was working on wasnt really meant to be a loud track.
What i really liked about mixbus was there was a more solid feeling of gain structure. My faders were more or less at zero for every track, where as in ardour i can end up with some tracks half way down on the fader.
What would be nice to have in ardour would be to atleast have a gain control for every track.
On the plus side, i learnt alot of realy usefull tricks from watching the mixbus videos that can be used in ardour, like gain automation. Where you split a track into regions and adjust the gain so that you can use compression more effectivly. particularly usefull on vocals when you get some phrases that are alot louder than the rest of the track.
Anyway, I’ll still continue to support ardour, even if i buy mixbus. Mixbus does have some really cool features, like the buses taking some of the plugin parameters and putting sliders for them under the plugin area.
The other thing i noticed between ardour and mixbus, was on my vocal track i ended up with a very noticable his that i had to mask by cutting out the silence and then using crosfades at the beginning and end of each region so that it was less noticable. In mixbus the his just wasnt there. Im guessing it was the EQ.
Theres no automation of sends in ardour 2 so that is a killer for me, i need to be able to use automation of sends when using delays so i can precisely catch specific words or phrases to a delay, easy peasy in ardour 3, but fidly in ardour 2 as you have to create an empty bus to use as a send.
anyway.
Thanks for all the information.
I’ll go back to trying different plugins again