Operator manual
openmixer is a mixing console built in software. Audio runs through it: inputs arrive from a stagebox or any PipeWire source, each channel has a fader and a chain of processing, PipeWire sums the buses, and the mix goes back out to the PA. You drive it from a web surface that any number of screens can share at once — one server holds the whole mix and every screen is a view of it, so a fader moved anywhere moves everywhere.
New here? Your first session takes a fresh install from silence to one channel audible in the main mix. Come back to this manual for everything else.
The desk
- The surface — the header, the layout chips, the fader bay, and where to find things that are not where you would first look.
- The console menus — Setup, Patch, Scenes, Meters and Layouts, item by item, and the rest of the header.
- Layouts, banks and the work zone — arranging the panels, paging the bay, USER pages and density.
- The channel strip — signal order, trim, the tile controls, selecting and naming, and the channel and bay overviews.
- Head-amp control — phantom power, pad, sensitivity and polarity, including on a REAC stagebox.
- EQ and dynamics — the interactive EQ curve, the gate and the compressor.
- The analyser — the live spectrum, the tilt reference, and reading a feedback ring on it.
- Feedback suppression — the automatic feedback corrector: ring-out and live modes, sensitivity, notch width, and the planted-notch roster.
- The harmonic processor — the instrument-aware adaptive EQ: what it hears, what it proposes, and what it plants.
- Alignment — two microphones on one source, and the loudspeakers in the room.
- Plugins, the rack and skins — inserts, the picker, the generated editor, ordering and skins.
- The plugin catalog — every plugin measured: latency, CPU cost and which ones run on the console's own audio thread.
- What to reach for — the short list for a show and the short list for a mix.
The mix
- Sends, buses, groups and DCAs — aux sends, sends-on-faders, bus masters, subgroups, DCAs and mute groups.
- LCR mains — a discrete centre speaker feed on MAIN: the format picker, divergence, the meter and leg block's third bar, and the X-Touch SHIFT gesture.
- The matrix and outputs — matrix outputs and per-output processing.
- Cue, solo and the monitor — PFL, AFL, solo-in-place, the monitor output, level and dim.
- The patchbay and the graph — getting real audio in and out.
- Talkback and test signals — the oscillator, noise generators and the talkback path.
Running a show
- Scenes and sessions — saving the console, snapshots, recall-safe and channel configs.
- Recording and virtual soundcheck — multitrack takes, and playing them back through the desk.
- Metering and latency — the meter bridge, loudness, and what the telemetry numbers mean.
- Personalities and themes — console profiles, brand character and accessibility.
- The Setup panels — allocation, adapters, control surfaces, stageboxes, discovery, the interface takeover and the network.
- The clock — the graph clock and the REAC wire, segment by segment.
- Keyboard reference — every shortcut.
Reference
- Frequently asked questions — short answers to questions that come up repeatedly, on the project site.