In professional mixing, EQ is what separates a good mix from a bad one. Perhaps the most glaring problem with MixPad is that there are no options for setting EQ (improving treble, bass, and other audio issues). Even zooming in on a clip is strangely difficult: You can zoom vertically and horizontally using arrows and buttons, but they look dated and move too incrementally. You can name tracks and organize them, but MixPad is still underpowered in terms of adding tags to tracks to organize them, or other visual cues. The software provides no options for setting recording levels and viewing an obvious record volume indicator, and there’s no metronome. WavePad-another program in the suite intended as a recording app-does support VST plug-ins.

Plug-in support would be a nice-to-have feature in MixPad, but recording is not really the program’s intended use. Without plug-in support though, the program becomes a lot less useful. That’s a shame, because you actually can use MixPad for recording live instruments.

So, if you use a program such as Native Instruments Guitar Rig as a plug-in for your recording software, it will not be available from MixPad. The bad news for audio professionals is that unlike the Windows version of the program, MixPad for Mac does not support VST plug-ins or any other audio plug-ins to extend the product. MixPad also supports drag and drop for audio clips, so you can create tracks in another program and drop them into MixPad for mixing as part of a production workflow. This simplicity at least makes the program easy to learn. MixPad has a simple interface that makes it easy to learn how to mix audio clips, but the program lacks the depth required for professional mixing.

Mixpad recording