#43

I recently added bitwig to my linux arsenal, along with renoise. Really loving it so far, I love having as many lfos as i need moving everything around. So happy the upgrade to 3 is included with the upgrade plan.

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#44

Exciting update… still there are no options or apps for the grid. Would change for Bitwig if it would also be a playground for Monome.

#45

From the posts above, bitwig definitely sounds intriguing. To what extent is this just a shiny new fun thing, vs a real fundamental shift in the standard DAW?

To play the devil’s advocate, perhaps people could describe what they don’t like about bitwig, or what they still like more about another DAW. I’m specifically interested in comparisons with Ableton, but would be curious to hear about others as well.

I am not super excited about learning yet another thing just to be ultimately disappointed and go back to ableton. I’m not at all opposed to learning new things, but for something that’s a critical component, like a DAW, I want to make sure I land on my feet on the other side.

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#46

I switched over to Bitwig back when v2 came out. I was thoroughly impressed (and still am) at the modulators, the midi timing and the arranger - splitting entire groups is great for large compositional re-arranging. Compared to Ableton it just worked no matter what I through at it… almost.

Sigh

The UI is just so sluggish on a Mac, it’s painful. Also the bare bones instruments require you to build in functionality. This is great for flexibility but not so great when—for example—you simply want to key track a filter. You pretty much have to build everything to get the functionality that you would expect. I’d prefer some modulators pre-wired. Sure you can make you’re own but who has time for that :wink:

But the worst thing is the audio engine suffers from a huge amount of audio clicks and zero-crossing pops.

Bitwig has a clip mode like Ableton Live but it’s useless for live recording > playback as it glitches at the moment it jumps from recording to playback. Additionally, live triggering different clips midway through their playback will also result in a click. Finally, trimming audio / events in the arranger view suffers from the same problem. Bitwig adds auto-fades at the Audio Event level but not at the Arranger Clip level so you spend way too much time re-adding fades on clips that have been split in the main timeline. There are a few other strange inconsistencies that don’t make sense but they’re hard to describe.

Alas, I recently moved back to Ableton but I I’ll be back if they fix some of these problems as they ultimately kill the flow of the software.

V3 does look very cool though and I’m a fan of their pricing model. I sat out 18 months of updates but can simply jump back in when V3 comes out for a reasonable price, unlike Ableton who charge $300 per major update.

4 Likes
#47

Interesting… I don’t find the UI sluggish at all, even on my 5 year macbook air. I’ve also not really noticed audio clicks, but that may be because I don’t really use it for audio, as I find Ableton much easier for warping.

The modularity of the effects and the modulators are really brilliant, and the cv devices make it dead simple to interface with a hardware modular. If this is the kind of thing that appeals to you, you won’t regret trying it out.

2 Likes
#48

I’m on a year old iMac so it should feel good, but compared with Live it just feels like it’s running at a lower frame rate. It’s still very usable however.

#49

My impression is that people still use bitwig and something else (often ableton). Does anyone use just bitwig?

I’m not sure I want to get locked into the subscription cycle just yet based on comments above, but maybe soon. I think I’ll check out the v3 demo at the very least.

Thanks for all the useful comments.

#50

I would be fine just using bitwig, and did so for a good chunk of last year. It’s only when I started working on collaborative projects that I started using ableton again. Although there are things ableton does better, I just ended up gravitating towards the things that bitwig is strong at.

#51

IMO the three big advantages that Ableton still has over Bitwig, as of 2.5, are:

  • Customization with M4L, and the community M4L ecosystem
  • Groove pool
  • Being able to exchange full sessions with collaborators using Ableton

Seems like 3.0 will address customizability with the modular environment, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be the dev platform that M4L is, and even in the best case scenario the ecosystem won’t grow overnight.

I still have a Live 9 license somewhere, and I try to work in hardware most of the time, but Bitwig has been my only DAW for 2+ years.

#52

i’ve been trying to use laptops/DAWs simply as a tape machine the last few years, and bitwig for this purpose is totally great.

this said, I never really used Ableton. prior to bitwig I used reaper, which remains excellent

5 Likes
#53

I’m with Tehn here. I’ve been using Bitwig since day one as a tape recorder for the most part. After Expert Sleepers released the ES-8 I added the ES-3 and ES-6 so I have 10 mono channels into Bitwig and 16 outs I can choose between audio or CV. Bitwig has been aggressive on pursuing this compatibility between Eurorack and the DAW and it appears this is going to get a lot more interesting with 3.0.

1 Like
#54

How do you use your Monome gear, especiall Grid with Bitwig? Unfortunately, there are no M4L tools to go with it in Bitwig…

#55

i’ve run max patches separately and just choose them via the midi interface options. haven’t had any issues…obviously, you can’t use any M4L specific programs, but there are other options out there.

#56

Speaking as someone seeking better, sleeker and more creative integration between computer and outboard / modular, Bitwig is by far and away the best software I’ve found. It looks to be cementing that position in the upcoming V3 update in q2 of this year.

I have found it considerably more buggy than Live 10, but the team address them pretty quickly.

1 Like
#57

At this point in the relative development of the two softwares, live 10 feels to me like an extremely stable workhorse by comparison. I find it much more stable / straightforward, especially for extended, complicated compositions, involving lots of tracks, time sig and tempo changes and so on. I’ve also found it handles large streams of midi data incoming from the modular via silent way with greater ease and less CPU strain.

BUT

In Bitwigs favour, the team (some of whom hail from Ableton, which is no surprise really given the GUI and structural layouts) have fully embraced a modular philosophy, one which looks at both fluid internal communications between software devices, and those software devices and outboard / modular equipment. There have been many times when, instead of having to deduce a workaround to a routing issue, or construct a complex envelope follower, etc etc, I have been able to simply employ one bitwig’s native techniques. Which is super, dooper satisfying!

3 Likes
#58

I’ve been a Bitwig user since its initial release. I had used Ableton intro before that, but not extensively so I was coming in fresh. I never got along with the Bitwig clip launcher view. I stepped away from it for a year or so, switching to a portastudio 4-track and Audacity when I needed to move tape to digital. I like the tape workflow a bunch. I came back to Bitwig (by upgrading my license to 2.x) to build a hybrid modular system via Bitwig and ES-8. That worked mostly ok, except for a fiddly experience getting the software to track pitch via ES-8 -> VCO. Bitwig works great in that “tape recorder” model. Its arrangement view isn’t an add on, it’s really full featured.

Then I went through my yearly “everything is broken in my workflow” crisis and came out the other side with a Live Suite license and a Push 2. I decided I wanted sampling (of old records, of my modular, of my cat) to be my main medium (until the next crisis), plus I wanted to play more notes (see my entry in the 2019 goals thread) and the tightly coupled Push / Live combo was going to fit that model better for me. I believe Live’s audio sample quantization / stretch algo’s sound better than Bitwig. It’s also a button on the Push (Sample, trim, quantize…all of a sudden my modular is in time. Am I lazy? Yes. Do I value creating as I play? yep. Does that make sense? I’m terrible at composition, I prefer playing / improvising, then editing as if I had composed for recording)

So - the workflow and some better sounding (to me) stretch stuff was the reason I picked up Ableton over Bitwig. There’s a script that supports Push 2 as a controller in Bitwig, but I haven’t tried it yet. If I switch back to Bitwig at any point, I think it’ll be because of their very clever modulators and their full boat support for hybrid analog / Bitwig systems.

2 Likes
#59

This was true for a while, but there was a Bitwig update a few months back where they added a ton of different algorithms with more parametric control for time and pitch shifting. Additionally, their Sampler revamp was excellent.

(I use both about equally)

3 Likes
#60

I fell out of upgrade support before this release, so all my comments are based on the previous release. Good point :slight_smile:

#61

One thing I noticed is that the default scaling of the CV Instrument device doesn’t correspond to 1V/Oct when used with the ES-8: once I found the correct value it worked a lot better.

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#62

Please share more about what you learned here regarding the scaling of the 1V/Oct.

1 Like