Bitwig Studio 6 details revealed, and editing gets a big boost

[smallerfish]

Bitwig is my favorite software - it really is all in one music production software, and they have great support for Linux. I have used it hooked up to a room full of synths, but these days (due to space constraints) I make music with just the software (with occasionally a midi keyboard). No need for any VSTs (unless you really want to) - the built in synths and effects plugins are high quality.

(I started out using trackers in the 90s - Fast, Impulse, and eventually Buzz. I held off using DAWs for a long time because I didn't like the lack of information density that trackers are good at, but turns out I really don't miss that in Bitwig.)

Here's a couple tracks I've made with it: https://synth8.bandcamp.com/track/spring-trap, https://synth8.bandcamp.com/track/prompt

[karlgrz]

Hey I played guitar on Prompt, small world, @smallerfish!

Bitwig rules.

[multjoy]

Have you tried Renoise for your tracker fix?

[Intermernet]

Good to see another fellow past Buzz user. Seriously underrated piece of software!

[whilenot-dev]

For people that don't know, Bitwig Studio is one of the few DAWs that support Linux officially. This is great news!

[AlecSchueler]

And for those who are curious: the other big one is Reaper, from the creator of WinAmp.

[Leptonmaniac]

For the other people who don't know: What's a DAW?

[pjmlp]

And for others that also don't know, a great example on how to do cool UIs with Java.

[mettamage]

Hey guys, I like making music using Bitwig and Logic. I used to do this for a year when I was 16. Now I’m more than twice as old and picked up the hobby again.

Does anyone want to connect and hangout (maybe even making some music together?). I also have a decent to good beatbox, some rapping skills (mostly Dutch but English too) and some indie singing skills. I started making EDM and lofi at the moment.

Maybe we could make a small group even and see what happens, no expectations.

My email is in my profile.

[Ylpertnodi]

sonobus.net

[nylonstrung]

I like Bitwig a lot and appreciate the Linux support

But there's a new FOSS DAW called Zrythm that is essentially a featureful clone of Bitwig I'd recommend

https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html

[DoesntMatter22]

Looks interesting but it doesn't look like it supports the independent track looping mode that bitwig does

[dottjt]

I wouldn't recommend it. It was very, very, very buggy and unpolished when I used it.

[meowface]

I started using Bitwig 10 years ago as my first (and still only) DAW, predicting it would be a good early adopter effort investment. I wasn't wrong.

[nialse]

Bitwig was the next big DAW with a lot of YouTubers making content some 3 years (?) ago, then the content suddenly stopped. It was some move the company made which upset the community IIRC. Bitwigs YouTube presence never recovered. Anyone with insights on what happened and how it has turned out eventually?

[hrnnnnnn]

It was specifically Benn Jordan and Venus Theory who cut their ties.

Polarity has never stopped making Bitwig content and I've learned an absolute ton of stuff from him.

https://youtube.com/polaritydnb/

[jedimastert]

They made a bunch of extra-special devices called the "spectral suite" that they were gonna paywall beyond the normal upgrade plan. There was the big backlash and they fully backed down pretty quickly and that was that.

I'm not sure why the content stopped, but it might be that it was sponsored content and a bunch of sponsor-creator relationships got soured

https://musictech.com/news/bitwig-studio-4-spectral-suite-ap...

[p0nce]

Most of the content in this space is paid for.

[80hd]

After using Ableton for years and previously Logic, I've never used music software that evolves as fast as Bitwig. The rate at which they improve it is pretty mind-blowing in comparison.

[whydid]

When the founders are also the lead engineers, incentives are aligned. I asked the Ableton CEO at multiple events and expos to fix repeatable bugs, and add proper PDC, and he mocked me.

[coldtea]

Not sure. 6 looks nice, but the past 3-4 versions just had this modularity improvements, which I don't particularly care for, and much smaller workflow, sequencing, audio editing, fx and audio vst improvements (which I do care for)

[diggan]

> I've never used music software that evolves as fast as Bitwig

I've been curious about Bitwig, played around with it a bit, but never made the switch from Ableton. After reading this, which I think was intended as a positive, I'm now less curious about Bitwig...

[wintermutestwin]

>There’s something refreshing about v6. No AI or stem separation.

Stem separation in Logic is an insanely useful feature.

[diggan]

> Stem separation in Logic is an insanely useful feature.

For some, and for others not. DAWs are so huge, feature-packed and try to cater to so many use cases, that at one point you have to say no to something.

While stem separation is useful for many things, I've only "missed" it for DJ duties, and then I'm not using a DAW anyways but whatever DJ OS/software the controller needs/has, so I'd probably say I'm another user who don't care about my DAW having stem separation or not. I don't think I've felt like I needed that even once for production purposes.

[mettamage]

Good to see Bitwig here. I alternate using Bitwig and Logic.

Would love if The Grid would get some kind of scripting support.

Also, a bit related and a bit not. Has anyone checked out Strudel? The musical programming language?

[segphault]

Strudel is fun. If you're interested in getting Strudel-like sequencing inside of a DAW, check out the latest version of Renoise, which added a Lua-based phrase scripting environment with support for Tidal Cycles notation. They also added it to their Redux plugin, so you can use it in literally any DAW.

[inciampati]

Yes! Strudel and tidal cycles are amazing livecoding systems. I'd like to match the expressiveness of bitwig though so I'm working on a merge of glicol (web based livecoding with signal processing) and studel.

[Kye]

>> "No AI or stem separation."

That's unfortunate. Live's ML-based sample tagging and similar sound search have been a huge help. I don't think I could give it up. I guess this wouldn't matter if you don't do much with samples but samples are a huge part of modern music production.

I've followed BitWig for a while now and it's increasingly clear with each release that they have a particular kind of music production in mind, and it's not for me. That's a good thing: being differentiated is how every other DAW has survived. I just had some hope it might permit a path to Linux for me and the way I make music some day.

[mrandish]

The new timeline event editing functionality looks fluid, powerful and polished. I've never used Bitwig but have heavily used dozens of timeline-based media editing GUIs over the last three decades including leading video, audio, animation, 3D and music production tools. Just watching these brief demo videos, I'm seeing some very nice editing features as well as thoughtful interaction touches.

I appreciate the Bitwig team's choice to focus on perfecting timeline event editing workflow at a time when many media production tools are bolting on poorly thought through AI features of questionable value. In most advanced media creation workflows, some detailed event editing will always be necessary and, IMHO, it's still far from a "solved problem."

While some tools have put in the sustained effort over many years to become "pretty good", IMHO none are yet "great", and too many are still lagging with 2000s-era timeline event editing. Even today's best of breed tools can become at least tedious, if not frustrating, during an intense multi-hour session of complex detail work. Yet in recent years I'm not seeing much sustained focus or effort going toward improving timeline event editing in most mature tools. While "Timeline Event Editing" isn't nearly as sexy sounding as AI - for me AI features in media creation tooling have so far mostly focused on reducing the time I spend doing the parts of media creation I enjoy the most. Whereas the features Bitwig is showing here are focused on minimizing the time and effort I have to doing the parts I hate the most.

[charcircuit]

>There’s something refreshing about v6. No AI or stem separation

I think it's weird to praise not adding useful features.

[jedimastert]

I don't know if you're in or around the musician or especially EDM producer community, or just the online artist community in general, but the general sentiment is that most if not all AI features are for people who aren't actually interested in making music, so maybe not actually all that useful.

[edem]

I bought a MIDI controller a few weeks ago and it came with a Bitwig license. I told one of my friends (musician, uses Ableton) and he told me that I should learn Ableton and forget about Bitwig. When I asked why he said that Bitwig is very new and it can disappear overnight just like many others before it. He said that the staying power of DAW software is very low. What's your take on this? I really liked Bitwig (much more than Ableton), but I don't want to invest my time into something that's not gonna be around.

[LevGoldstein]

It's been around for over a decade at this point, so I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Ableton Live at this point. Bitwig was made by ex-Ableton engineers and outside of some of the more niche features, they're similar enough that anything you learn about Bitwig is transferable to using Ableton Live. Much more so than trying to move to one of them from Reaper, for instance. If you depend mostly on 3rd party plugins and less on what's built into the DAW, then they're effectively the same outside of simple navigation quirks unique to each.

I have active licenses for both and have used both for personal projects. I find Ableton to be slightly faster to navigate, probably because I've been using it for longer. If manufacturers of high quality multichannel interfaces had better Linux support, I'd migrate fully to Bitwig.

[cyberpunk]

I don't think you'll find a professional studio anywhere that doesn't have at least one Ableton live station. If you're into electronic music you'll be hard not to spot live being the driver for a lot of (non-dj) performances. I don't really think you can go wrong with it. But either way, switching isn't too much of a problem.

I'm with Ableton because I love the push hardware and ui, but everyone's different.

[immibis]

It's up to major version 6 (almost) and has been around for 11 years. At what point will your friend be satisfied?

[dfedbeef]

DAWs are sort of all the same, your friend just wants to be able to share project files. The project file formats are the annoying part. Operating the DAW is usually sort of similar across different programs nowadays. Slightly different key binds.

[afarviral]

I wasn't planning to renew so soon. Then they dropped this bombshell and I impulse bought another 12 months subscription. So far I'm digging it and looking forward to composing some spicey chord progressions.

[Polarity]

Can't live without Bitwig!

[henjodottech]

I do not think I could deal without my m4l devices and rack presets in ableton - if it weren’t for that I would probably be using bitwig.

[oh_my_goodness]

Can anyone give a few specific advantages of Bigwig over say Logic or Ableton?

[vunderba]

Don't know if it is still the case - but one of Bitwig's initial advantages over Ableton was that it did a better job of "siloing" your plugins, so if for some reason one of your VSTs crashed it didn't take the entire DAW down with it.

[JodieBenitez]

Made the switch from Ableton to Bitwig a few years ago and never looked back so maybe out of date now:

    - modulations everywhere that is actually easy to use and works
    - easier modular synth environment than Max. Think easy like Nord modular but much, much better
    - Linux support
    - better UI overall

[replygirl]

bitwig is the leader in probabilistic sequencing and automation. they entered the space with three big ideas: (1) you can modulate anything by anything else, (2) any modulation can have probability applied, and (3) automation can be applied to individual notes. these ideas were always around but relegated to more niche tools like reason and max. thanks to bitwig, the other daws have spent a lot of the last ten years applying these ideas as well, but bitwig still has the most complete solution. it's a great primary daw for outboard- and plugin-averse recording engineers and bedroom producers; it's the best _secondary_ daw if you use one of the majors for work and want something fresh for play, inspiration, or continuing education.

i use ableton. every time i get excited for an update, it's because i'm finally getting something bitwig users have had for years

[dfedbeef]

Oh hell yeah

[mmmnnn]

yea