Many of us are using room/headphone correction software since it’s way cheaper to use such software (e.g. Sonarworks, Goodhertz CanOpener) than to build an ideal acoustically treated room. While we can just put these plugins on our master bus/mix bus/2 bus, we have to keep in mind that we have to turn them off before printing our project. With a listen bus, there won’t be such a problem since it would sit after the master bus and it would be turned off automatically before printing. Also, a separate listen bus can help with de-cluttering the mix bus - we can put our room correction and metering plugins on a separate bus.
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
Nicely (IMHO)
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
Yes (an no). We can’t solve the “don’t forget to turn those plugins off before printing” issue but we can partially solve the “clutter” issue by just creating a track (called “Mix Bus” for example) where we would route all of our other tracks and then we route this track to the master track. We put our mix bus processing on the Mix Bus track and we put our room correction/metering plugins on our master track. The issue with this solution is that we need to manually route all our tracks to the Mix Bus track (and we still need to turn off the room correction plugins before printing).
Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?
Not sure.
Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?
Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I checked out the video approx. where you specified but I didn’t hear him talk about a specific solution for that for Bitwig. He was just including it in the list of items he misses from Cubase (and he called it “a really huge thing” that he misses). Also, I looked at the master bus in Bitwig and there doesn’t seem to be an option to route the output to an audio track. But I believe you, I might have just missed it so if you have those specific steps, I’d like to know how to do it
damn, then it was the wrong video. sorry.
here’s a pic of my session… first track is the control room and master is routed to the control room. and the control room to the Studio.
However, you have to select the master when exporting. but you can do whatever you want on the control room. And I also use it as a marker track.
Thanks for the screenshot, I got it now - the key is to first route the Control Room track to Studio and then it will show up as an output for the master track. I’ll add this to my template
Still, this is just a workaround for a feature that could be relatively easily implemented since it already has “built in” support like this. The ability for the listen track to not show up in the tracks area would also be nice. Anyway, thanks again for the tip, Bitwig is super flexible and this is another example of it.
That is not the correct solution. You send all of your tracks to the Master as usual. Then you route the master to one Listen Bus and one Headphone Bus. These are two Effect Send tracks with their outputs switched from Master Bus (they will be by default) to your actual hardware D/A outputs for the speaker mains and headphone. You put Sonar on the Headphone Bus. Or, if you only have one D/A, you only have the Listen Bus and you stick Sonar on that (which requires you turning Sonar on and off depending on which hardware you are listening to). Anyway, the point is that your ability to use the Master output for exporting is preserved, as usual.
Yep, I did it this way, routed all my tracks to Master (the default setting) and routed Master to the Listen Bus. I put Sonarworks and CanOpener on the Listen Bus only, since I also use Sonarworks for my speakers, not only for headphones (and I don’t want to have two instances of Sonarworks running in my project). But since you are routing your Master Bus to the Listen Bus, you still have to manually turn off the plugins or change the output routing on the Master to Studio before printing the project.
I have all my tracks/busses etc. in an extra folder. All mainbus processing wich should be printed is also on this bus, wich goes to the Master and then to the listening bus. Not really sure, if this helps, but when exporting you just select the bus or you can record the bus on an extra audiotrack…
(IMHO)
