Merging launch Music Mission for Anubis

Posted on: Tuesday 25th of May 2021

An interesting feature of Merging’s Anubis Ravenna interface, reviewed in Resolution V21.1, was the potential for it to completely change its functionality through the update of its ‘Missions’ – essentially its configuration and operation settings. The unit launched with one such Mission – monitor control – but now an update from the manufacturers is set to expand the potential use cases for the system, as promised. 

The new ‘Music Mission’ lands after an intensive period of beta testing with an international roster of musicians, engineers and producers, and can now be downloaded by existing users free of charge. All new Anubix units will ship with Music and Monitor Missions pre-installed. When switching on the unit, choosing the Mission requires a simple press of the touchscreen.

The new Music Mission provides an up-to 48 in/24 out, low-latency mixer with multiple effects, the size of which is dictated by the number of AoIP devices on your network. Instead of using a matrix to manage your I/O sources and destinations, newly developed Peer and Unite features add the additional channels to your mixer with a simple screen tap, with routing managed from the Anubis touchscreen. Although you initially see the faders and a few buttons, there are full channel strips from top to bottom with local and remote control of preamps, EQ, Dynamics, Reverb, Sends, Auxes and features such as; Pan, Solo, Solo PFL, Mute, Linking, Grouping, Naming and more.

The Music Mission embeds multiple mixers which allows the creation of up to five different mixes for your performers’ cues or programs. Different input sources or a unique mix balance can be routed to any outputs thanks to the flexible bus routing. Additionally, there are 18 ‘Snapshots’ to save and fully recall any of your mixer, masters, songs or setups with the possibility to customise your mixer layouts depending on whether you are in the studio or live on stage. All this can be done without having a DAW connected.

You don’t need to switch to the Monitor Mission to know what you are doing. The Music Mission provides all the necessary monitoring controls with; Ref, Dim, Mono, Downmix and exclusive monitoring Mutes. Along with A/B speaker set support, 2.1 and 2.2 with crossover and built-in crossfeed for headphones. This also applies to being able to create and monitor your artists’ cues, interact and talk to any musician or all of them at once. The Anubis Ultra-Low Latency Cue Mixers are the perfect tools to put musicians at ease and have them deliver the best performances possible. Cues can be used when recording, overdubbing, playing live or for independent program distribution.

Included free in every Anubis are three effects, which can be applied to your monitoring, recordings or live performance on any Strips, Buses or Returns and recalled at any time on one of the 18 available effects snapshots. Included are a 4-band EQ built on the existing Pyramix EQ-X; a dynamics section including a Gate, Compressor and Limiter can be combined in series and operate in mono or stereo mode; and a reverb. The Music Mission also has three Sends for external effects chains, which can be applied to any channel strip.

Included in all missions are tools that allow the user to expand, monitor, mix and route any I/O anywhere over your network with quick and simple solutions. What’s even better is that all this can be done from a single Anubis and even be in operation with standalone devices interconnected. The Peering feature allows I/O expansion without the need for computer set-up. In conjunction with this, the Unite feature provides AoIP stream patching that allows quick connections the Anubis and a DAW without the need for any AoIP knowledge or additional software; however a web app will allow full remote control from computer or tablet show you want more screen real estate or remote control access to the Anubis from another device on the same network.

Both missions can be supplied on the Pro or Premium versions of Anubis and Anubis SPS, the latter of which can handle extra I/O without the need to add an external network switch, or work in full ST2022-7 redundancy mode for extra safety.

You can read the full Merging+Anubis review in Resolution V21.1, available digitally via Issuu or as a physical or digital copy here.