<p>
Your Nucleus comes complete with a number of "profiles" for a few
well-known DAWs. At the time of writing it does not include one for
- Ardour (or related products such as Harrison Mixbus). This is
- unfortunate because although Ardour could easily be used with any of
- the existing profiles, one thing they all have in common is a
- remarkably large of buttons not assigned to Mackie Control
- functions. This means that using one of them will "waste" the
- buttons, a resource that the Nucleus is not particularly rich in
- (compared with some other Mackie Control devices).
+ Ardour (or related products such as Harrison Mixbus).
+</p>
+<p>
+ We have prepared a profile in which as many buttons as possible send
+ Mackie Control messages, which makes the device maximally useful
+ with Ardour (and Mixbus). You can
+ download <a href="https://community.ardour.org/files/ArdourNucleusProfile.zip">the
+ profile</a>
+ and load it to your Nucleus using the <code>Edit Profiles</code>
+ button in SSL's Nucleus Remote application. Be sure to select it for
+ the active DAW layer in order to make Ardour work as well as
+ possible. <em>Note: unfortunately, the Nucleus Remote application
+ only runs on OS X or Windows, so Linux users will need access to
+ another system to load the profile. We will provide notes on the
+ profile settings at a future time.</em>
</p>
<h2>Connecting the Nucleus</h2>
<h3>Cons</h3>
<dl>
<dt>No Master Faster</dt>
- <dd></dd>
+ <dd>It is not possible to control the level of the Master bus or
+ Monitor section. Really don't know what SSL was thinking here.</dd>
<dt>No dedicated rec-enable buttons</dt>
<dd>You have to press the "Rec" button and convert the per-strip
"Select" buttons into rec-enables</dd>
<dd>No need for multiple MIDI cables to get 16 faders</dd>
<dt>Broadcast connectivity</dt>
<dd>Connecting to multiple computers does not require recabling</dd>
- <dt>15 faders from a single box</dt>
+ <dt>16 faders from a single box</dt>
<dd>No need to figure out how to keep extenders together</dd>
<dt>Meters separated from displays</dt>
<dd>Contrast with the Mackie Control Universal Pro, where meters
buttons, but this is only necessary because of the relatively few
global buttons on the surface.
</dd>
+ <dt>Builtin analog signal path</dt>
+ <dd>SSL clearly expects users to route audio back from their
+ computer via the Nucleus' own 2 channel output path, and maybe even
+ use the input path as well. They take up a significant amount of
+ surface space with the controls for this signal path, space that
+ could have been used for a master fader or more Mackie Control
+ buttons. The USB audio device requires a proprietary driver, so
+ Linux users can't use this, and OS X/Windows users will have to
+ install a device driver (very odd for a USB audio device these
+ days). The analog path also no doubt adds notable cost to the
+ Nucleus. There's nothing wrong with this feature for users that
+ don't already have a working analog/digital signal path for their
+ computers. But who is going to spend $5000 on a Nucleus that
+ doesn't have this already?</dd>
</dl>