Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

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MC3PO
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Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by MC3PO »

I'm trying to decide on a DAW to use on my Ubuntu OS. Coming from using Logic on a Mac I'm trying to find something similar. I will be mostly recording some guitar tracks that I want to fill out with MIDI drums, synths, pianos, samplers etc. I was a huge fan of the EXS24 or example. I've narrowed it down to Reaper and Mixbus (Mixbus is currently on discount for $15 for the next day or so). After reading a lot of reviews (Slant etc.) it seems they are both rated pretty highly and have everything I need. I'd like to try them both to compare but with the discount offer for mixbus running out soon I thought I'd see what you guys and gals think and maybe it'll spur me to take the plunge. I quite like the mixbus compression feature and the analog tape saturation that I've listened too but its not a deal breaker. I'm not looking for expert level MIDI features either. I would probably just need some automation and effects. I've read about Mixbus' MIDI is a little clunky, unintuitive and limited. Is it true? I also like that Reaper is CPU less intensive, also true?

So my main question is how do they fair for basic MIDI processes comparatively? Also how do they both compare with plugin compatibility?

Thanks.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by d.healey »

I haven't used Mixbus but I imagine the MIDI features are the same as Ardour, which is pretty poor. Reaper is far better for MIDI but it's non-free. If you don't mind using non-free software, and it sounds like you don't, then go for Reaper. Otherwise I'd recommend you try out Qtractor or Muse for MIDI work and Ardour/Mixbus for audio tracking/sequencing.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by sysrqer »

I would go for Reaper personally. I'm not a fan of Mixbus (mainly due to them disabling some routing capability in order to make their business model work), and Reaper comes with tons of plugins so I'm sure you'd be able to find a comparable compressor. Unfa on youtube has done a few videos about the shortcomings/bugs of Ardour's midi workflow so I imagine the same applies to Mixbus. That said, you might find it perfectly useable, depending on what you need to do.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by sunrat »

For 15 bucks Mixbus is a no-brainer, just get it. MIDI works OK for what is there but is still under development. It does have the best mixer section of any DAW. Many people mention on the Mixbus forum they track in Reaper or Studio One or whatever and mix down in Mixbus.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by sunrat »

sysrqer wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 12:53 pm I'm not a fan of Mixbus (mainly due to them disabling some routing capability in order to make their business model work)
Please explain. I've used Mixbus for a number of years and never heard this before.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by sysrqer »

sunrat wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 1:00 pm
sysrqer wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 12:53 pm I'm not a fan of Mixbus (mainly due to them disabling some routing capability in order to make their business model work)
Please explain. I've used Mixbus for a number of years and never heard this before.
It's been a while since I looked into it but from the email conversation I had with them these are the details:
I work with large numbers of vocals takes, mostly doubled, so my usual workflow is to create a submix bus to group pairs of small groups of tracks so I can process them together. When I do this in Mixbus DAW the panning information from the audio tracks is lost and seem to be sent in mono.
Looking a bit more deeply I also noticed that aux buses behave in the same way.

I'm a little puzzled by this because as an Ardour user I know this is not how Ardour works so it seems a very strange imposed limitation. I understand the idea that we are supposed to use the dedicated Mixbus busses but even with Mixbus 32C I think I would be running out of busses if I am supposed to use them for subgroups, groups, and FX returns. And I only work with vocals, I can't imagine how this could work when dealing with a large band recording.
There are 2 issues here.

Firstly, there is a bug: the direct outputs of the tracks should indeed pan with the main panner (this is how it's shown in our signal-flow diagram). We will fix that bug in an upcoming version.

Secondly: as you inferred, we discourage the DAW-style mixing workflow. The point of Mixbus is to revert to the buss-style mixing that is used in "hit-making" studios. It's a subtle difference but very important.

You should group your vocal tracks into one or more of the 8 provided mixbuses. You can use a combination of the mixbuses, "post fader plugins", group assignments, and VCA faders to create very complicated routing and level-control combinations while staying within the Harrison mixer. The intent is to stay inside the Harrison mixing engine, so our panning/summing/mixing engine can do its job.

Post-fader plugins serve a large part in making this work. On both the channels and the mixbuses, you can add a reverb (for example) post-fader by dragging the plugin below the fader in the signal flow. This allows you to ride the level of the voices with the fader, and allow the reverb to ring out. In other DAWs this requires an additional stage of bussing.

Another option you should investigate is the layering feature available in the editor. If you'd like to stack multiple takes of a vocal, you can do that directly in the editor by right-clicking on the region(s) and deselecting Gain->Opaque from the context menu. This allows each region to be audibly "transparent' and you can stack layers of voices atop each other without requiring additional tracks .. and implicitly this also means that they will be panned & processed together in the track processing.
There is also some more info in a thread here - https://forum.harrisonconsoles.com/thre ... age-2.html I don't remember if that was me but it seems likely. Perhaps my claim about it being a business model reason is inaccurate but this is what I took away from it in the end. I'm fairly sure there were still issues after their bug fix eventhough everything was working according to their design.

Perhaps for most people this is not an issue but for me it was a showstopper. At the time I was either making dub or mixing large vocal recordings so either way only using the mixbuses was very limiting.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by tavasti »

MC3PO wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 11:34 am I'm trying to decide on a DAW to use on my Ubuntu OS. Coming from using Logic on a Mac I'm trying to find something similar. I will be mostly recording some guitar tracks that I want to fill out with MIDI drums, synths, pianos, samplers etc. I was a huge fan of the EXS24 or example. I've narrowed it down to Reaper and Mixbus (Mixbus is currently on discount for $15 for the next day or so). After reading a lot of reviews (Slant etc.) it seems they are both rated pretty highly and have everything I need. I'd like to try them both to compare but with the discount offer for mixbus running out soon I thought I'd see what you guys and gals think and maybe it'll spur me to take the plunge. I quite like the mixbus compression feature and the analog tape saturation that I've listened too but its not a deal breaker. I'm not looking for expert level MIDI features either. I would probably just need some automation and effects. I've read about Mixbus' MIDI is a little clunky, unintuitive and limited. Is it true? I also like that Reaper is CPU less intensive, also true?
I am Mixbus user, and for recorded audio / mixing it is great. And indeed, in midi there is some bugs, and usabiliti is not the best. But it is usable, I currently do all my midi stuff also on Mixbus. But I am pretty sure Reaper midi is better.

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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by MC3PO »

Thanks guys, really helpful. I appreciate it. :D
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by Jamesf »

sysrqer wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 2:04 pm
sunrat wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 1:00 pm
sysrqer wrote: Mon Feb 15, 2021 12:53 pm I'm not a fan of Mixbus (mainly due to them disabling some routing capability in order to make their business model work)
Please explain. I've used Mixbus for a number of years and never heard this before.
It's been a while since I looked into it but from the email conversation I had with them these are the details:
I work with large numbers of vocals takes, mostly doubled, so my usual workflow is to create a submix bus to group pairs of small groups of tracks so I can process them together. When I do this in Mixbus DAW the panning information from the audio tracks is lost and seem to be sent in mono.
Looking a bit more deeply I also noticed that aux buses behave in the same way.

I'm a little puzzled by this because as an Ardour user I know this is not how Ardour works so it seems a very strange imposed limitation. I understand the idea that we are supposed to use the dedicated Mixbus busses but even with Mixbus 32C I think I would be running out of busses if I am supposed to use them for subgroups, groups, and FX returns. And I only work with vocals, I can't imagine how this could work when dealing with a large band recording.
There are 2 issues here.

Firstly, there is a bug: the direct outputs of the tracks should indeed pan with the main panner (this is how it's shown in our signal-flow diagram). We will fix that bug in an upcoming version.

Secondly: as you inferred, we discourage the DAW-style mixing workflow. The point of Mixbus is to revert to the buss-style mixing that is used in "hit-making" studios. It's a subtle difference but very important.

You should group your vocal tracks into one or more of the 8 provided mixbuses. You can use a combination of the mixbuses, "post fader plugins", group assignments, and VCA faders to create very complicated routing and level-control combinations while staying within the Harrison mixer. The intent is to stay inside the Harrison mixing engine, so our panning/summing/mixing engine can do its job.

Post-fader plugins serve a large part in making this work. On both the channels and the mixbuses, you can add a reverb (for example) post-fader by dragging the plugin below the fader in the signal flow. This allows you to ride the level of the voices with the fader, and allow the reverb to ring out. In other DAWs this requires an additional stage of bussing.

Another option you should investigate is the layering feature available in the editor. If you'd like to stack multiple takes of a vocal, you can do that directly in the editor by right-clicking on the region(s) and deselecting Gain->Opaque from the context menu. This allows each region to be audibly "transparent' and you can stack layers of voices atop each other without requiring additional tracks .. and implicitly this also means that they will be panned & processed together in the track processing.
There is also some more info in a thread here - https://forum.harrisonconsoles.com/thre ... age-2.html I don't remember if that was me but it seems likely. Perhaps my claim about it being a business model reason is inaccurate but this is what I took away from it in the end. I'm fairly sure there were still issues after their bug fix eventhough everything was working according to their design.

Perhaps for most people this is not an issue but for me it was a showstopper. At the time I was either making dub or mixing large vocal recordings so either way only using the mixbuses was very limiting.
I ran into this issue myself, recently: annoying, but not a showstopper.
The panning was the main problem for me, but the solution is to use aux sends instead of patching the direct outputs in Jack. Good to know they regard that as a bug and intend to fix it, though I still don't understand why they tap the direct outputs in different places in the signal path for mono vs stereo tracks.

I don't think it's a business-model thing, so much as a strong opinion about the workflow. Even their docs state that, although they discourage the use of DAW-style busses for subgrouping, sometimes that's the solution for the problem you have. Not disabled, just discouraged.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by sunrat »

I'm pretty sure that bug is fixed now. The quoted thread was from 2017 about Mixbus 4. Current version is 6.2.270 .

Mixbus is the first DAW I've used for any length of time, after not enjoying some others particularly ProTools. There are a few things in Mixbus I struggled to understand mainly because my theoretical understanding of how things work may not have been the same as actuality. Most times I just needed to RTFM or occasionally ask at their forum, and often I would come around to thinking their function concept was better than my theoretical idea. The manual is over 500 pages so not something one can learn overnight!
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by alexson »

Mixbus MIDI is the best of these two.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by Largos »

You can try reaper for free fully functional and there is a demo for mixbus which only puts a small hiss in every now and then*, so really the best idea is to see for yourself which one is best for you.

*As you are testing midi, probably not a concern if you route it externally.
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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by kirjis »

I have both Mixbus 5 and current Reaper, and I use Reaper to make music and Mixbus only occasionally mix and master, because at least the version 5 MIDI is just painful compared to Reaper. I use MIDI to play virtual instruments in and to edit them, and I found Mixbus to be very annoying and Reaper to be very nice. This is my experience only, of course, and you'd best try them both and decide for yourself.

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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by gennargiu »

Hi i used mixbus 7 and reaper 6.2.8 on mx linux and windows 10 for audio and midi and all ok no problems :wink:

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Re: Reaper MIDI vs. Mixbus MIDI

Post by ufug »

As a long-time user of Mixbus (since v3), I have to say MIDI on Reaper is considerably easier and more flexible than Mixbus. It's not even close.

Re: plugins, there's really no significant difference since Reaper started supporting LV2.

I switched to Reaper in December just to test it, but now I can't imagine going back to Mixbus. The only thing I miss is Harrison's built in EQ and compressor(s) because they are so convenient/easy/sound so good, but for everything else I find Reaper to be superior.
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