However, you can still find yourself frustrated, bogged down with juggling multiple individual plug-ins and all the attendant inserting, comparing, routing and bussing hassles this approach can throw up.

No matter how many plug-ins you own, your burden doesn't get any heavier. Naturally, if you're working entirely 'in the box', all the hardware you need is your laptop and an audio interface.

The 'portable power' modus operandi of a 500 series rack has enabled musicians and producers to easily ferry their favourite hardware hither and, when necessary, thither, instead of relying on whatever equipment a fellow collaborator or recording studio might already have installed. The 500 series 'lunchbox' hardware has proved very popular over the last decade, with the diminutive proportions of each module making a full 500 rack much more portable, but in no way less powerful, than a traditional 19'-wide multi-unit FX rack. And they’re good.MixBox is IK's virtual 500 series-style FX rack. The stock plugins I have in Logic are enough for my needs, there are so many of them that it’s possible to get what I want almost every time and the stock plugins are much lighter on cpu. I don’t have mixbus on the iPad to compare big I’ve got some IK plugins on desktop and tried the mixbus demo when the group guy came out but I wasn’t tempted to get it. :-) an probably good enough unless you have a fantastic studio monitor setup where you can hear the difference. Also if you want an upgrade in sound or more character from some of the ‘bread and butter’ type stock plugins I think the Toneboosters plugins stack up pretty well against IK and are well priced.Īnd you can also add something like ToneStack pro, which I’m not suggesting is sonically the same but you can make pedal board setups which are fun and add some of the more esoteric guitar pedal type effects to your setup and can be chained similar to mixbus.

Ik multimedia mix box