I bought Bitwig to compliment my main DAW (Studio One). Nowadays as I use it more and more for composition, sound design and generating ideas. Very fun and slick! I find myself using my grooveboxes less and less. The hardware intergration with (in my case) a simple Nektar keyboard is so tight, that I get that groovebox workflow but with unlimited flexability. It's all about the launcher view for me personally. Also, the way modulators etc work is very inspiring and give the DAW a "musical instrument" feel. I still look to bounce down tracks and mix in Studio One, but that's just a matter of taste. My only complaint is that in the UK the update price (in the sale) is £110, which is a bit overpriced for me personally, Studio One update from 4-5 cost me £75 and that update lasts longer. Still though I highly recommend Bitwig to anyone looking for a complimentary workflow to thier existing DAW. I've also thought a lot about what I'd recommend to new guys and gals looking to get into music creation and Bitwig as well as Maschine come out on top for me.
This is so brilliant ! What I love about Bitwig is that every functionality is polished, has purpose, and most of them are so innovative in terms of user experience and workflow optimization. I'm totally sold to Bitwig now :) Comping workflow is awesome and Operators made Bitwig truly ahead of the competition ! Please keep up those great updates !
I had a lot of fun with the 4.0 beta but they still have to fix the way midi program changes work. In all other daws and hardware sequencers the change events are sent with a note but in Bitwig you need to use the automation curve. When a clip is stopped or another clip without a program change is selected the value jumps back to "0". That makes it impossible to use for larger Livesets.
"Nothing sounds like a loop until it's repeated and then everything sounds like a loop." This is some George Clinton-level wisdom here. I learned a lot from this video, but this is the most important lesson.
Sounds like someone at Bitwig recently discovered the Elektron sequencer. The new operator functions seem almost identical to some of the features of a Digitakt.
It's a cycle, All new DAWs start out being uncluttered, fresh and cool. Then everyone asks for "mo features" and eventually they end up like all the other DAWs, bloated, cluttered and difficult to use. It's why when you want to write some quick text it's easier to open a text editor than a word processor.
@@6581punk Yes, bloatware.. I'm old enough to have witnessed the days of Windows 95 😂 I watched Outlook evolve from a 9mb installer to a 160mb installer. Ps. HUGE fan of text-edit 🤓
Intriguing. I've been unpleasantly surprised at the performance issues of Ableton 11 on my newly purpose-built PC (i9 9900K, 64GB RAM, 3 SSDs, GTX 1650 GPU, Thunderbolt MOTU interface, latest Win10 fresh install). Can anyone speak to Bitwig's performance and ability to leverage multiple CPU cores/threads? It may be the perfect time for me to try a new DAW.
I guess your mileage may vary applies (as ever). If you have 256 instance of Kontakt player frankly who knows. What I know is a bit about the architecture of Bitwig (from a systems engineer software developer perspective), and my own personal experience on a similar level hardware setup. Bitwig did something very smart imho and spent a lot of time to get the architecture right from the get go. Probably taking experiences from previous attempts I'm sure. The thing is Bitwig on some level is, at the foundational level, similar to an operating system... managing resources, distributing and isolating tasks across cores and handling asynchronous communication. Load balancing instruments, whether they be built-in or VST's in sandboxed hosted processes. The upshot of this is the ability to balance machine resources at a pretty granular level, and also provide safeguards so that a badly behaving VST that crashes won't take down the system. I rarely, if ever experience losing work in Bitwig. It is quite bulletproof. The way they approached inter-process communication is also extremely fast using shared memory regions. So the fact VST's are externally hosted from the core process has marginal effect on performance. But enough technical stuff. It's pretty damn snappy, and I have rarely run into performance issues while producing. The only exception to this might be using a plugin that was designed for offline rendering, but using it in the live mix. Although frankly the fact I can even attempt it is again due to the very good load balancing. My only issue is that the current rendering technology they are using (esp. on 4k screens), can get a little laggy with multiple monitor setups. That problem popped up somewhere in the late 3.x builds, but it seems like they have worked on that since and I haven't seen it recently. Still a possible concern if you have three 4k monitors with a lot of updates going on, so just mentioning it. This does not affect audio playback in my tests. All in all I'd say you are going to be quite happy with performance, and I am very impressed and confident the engineering team know what they are doing. I doubt you will have problems with that rig. Hope this helps.
My experience is that Bitwig gave me a noticable boost in performance and stability with the same hardware coming from Cubase. Also Bitwig seems to give up more gracefully before it runs out of juice, not just start acting up then freeze. Never lost a take in years with 3.2.
I use an oc i9 9900k and I can say it is really hard to kill the cpu with buffer size pulled all the way up. A lot of times I will have the buffer super small and have no idea till much later. Never crashed ever, sandboxing ftw. Last, even if you do come to kill it, group all tracks, bounce grouped track and disable will free up all the tracks and now ure cpu starts from scratch. This is so much faster than freezing tracks cuz you only need to bounce one track compared to a bunch of tracks. Bounce once, disable, and move on.
Bitwig seems to run more efficiently on my intel hardware than any of my other Daws, including Ableton, Logic and Reason. Just upgraded to Apple Silicon, m1 Pro MBP and it's no contest ... It seems next generation. The developers are the best in the business, imo ...
@@jumpstar9000 Awesome, thanks everybody. These were exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Wish I'd seen these responses sooner. I'm definitely going to give Bitwig a shot.
something like a "seed history" function would be great so you could go back through the last x number of seeds it there's something i liked. or maybe seeds could be comps
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that assumed midi comping was included when I got into Bitwig. Here we are nearly a year since this video and still no midi comping.
Does Bitwig have an auto quantize feature like what us found in Cubase, Reaper, etc.? Talking about the ability for the software to automate the timing correction work flow that is done manually in this video during the comping demonstration. This seems like the one missing feature that is needed tk make Bitwig the perfect all aroubd solution for me, but I would be totally fine with leveraging a thir party plugin to manage this if anyone has recommendations to look into.
How would I do to get the resulting flattened clip with all the operators frozen? Is there a command for this or do I have to print it into the arrange window?
You can do whatever you want to do with Bitwig, sure there are better DAWs for orchestral and other genres, but you can do other genres just fine, it's still a full DAW. I do prog rock and jazz fusion and many people do more, give it a go!
@@DrawAndErase Well, not really. You can't freeze tracks, group multitrack MIDI outputs (I dont think), bounce MIDI to stems, MIDI purge, notate scores, plus a number of other minor things which would make it annoying as hell to use for orchestral arranging.
Like I said it's not the best for orchestral stuff but it can handle other genres just fine not just EDM. You can bounce and deactivate tracks which work well, you can group multitrack midi outputs and bounce to separate stems. But yeah I appreciate for that application it's not ideal.
@@DrawAndErase Would you mind explaining how to do all that? I can bounce MIDI, but it can't be undone like freezing. I would love to see how you stem a MIDI multitrack (aka a Kontakt instrument that has up to 16 extra MIDI tracks pointing to it on different MIDI channels)
Bitwig is really becoming the smartest DAW. Great update.
Great presentation as usual from Dave! And don't forget that you can now import Ableton and FL Studio projects in Bitwig!
Whaaaaaaat?
@@StudioLams Yes :-)
That’s so wild
@@StudioLams And it works!
Is there a way to also do the inverse, to open a bitwig project into ableton?
What i love to see in bitwig:
- Midi Comping
- Scales Highlights like ableton
- capture midi & audio
- Warp in Sampler
I bought Bitwig to compliment my main DAW (Studio One). Nowadays as I use it more and more for composition, sound design and generating ideas. Very fun and slick! I find myself using my grooveboxes less and less. The hardware intergration with (in my case) a simple Nektar keyboard is so tight, that I get that groovebox workflow but with unlimited flexability. It's all about the launcher view for me personally. Also, the way modulators etc work is very inspiring and give the DAW a "musical instrument" feel. I still look to bounce down tracks and mix in Studio One, but that's just a matter of taste.
My only complaint is that in the UK the update price (in the sale) is £110, which is a bit overpriced for me personally, Studio One update from 4-5 cost me £75 and that update lasts longer.
Still though I highly recommend Bitwig to anyone looking for a complimentary workflow to thier existing DAW. I've also thought a lot about what I'd recommend to new guys and gals looking to get into music creation and Bitwig as well as Maschine come out on top for me.
I actually switched from S1 permanently bc of bitwig! 😙
The implementation of the operators looks so sick. And the seed generation feature is brilliant!
This is so brilliant ! What I love about Bitwig is that every functionality is polished, has purpose, and most of them are so innovative in terms of user experience and workflow optimization. I'm totally sold to Bitwig now :) Comping workflow is awesome and Operators made Bitwig truly ahead of the competition ! Please keep up those great updates !
I ❤️ Dave Linnenbank
I had a lot of fun with the 4.0 beta but they still have to fix the way midi program changes work. In all other daws and hardware sequencers the change events are sent with a note but in Bitwig you need to use the automation curve. When a clip is stopped or another clip without a program change is selected the value jumps back to "0". That makes it impossible to use for larger Livesets.
Basically they have implemented the Elektron sequencer "bells and whistles" in bitwig.
why no MIDI comping?? far more useful to me than audio comping!
still waiting as well
Excellent presentation Dave - congrats on v4
Audio comping.. been missing this since V1.0!! That and the native M1 support, take my upgrade €€€!!
Best DAW!! Imo
That comping workflow would be amazing for my Octatrack+modular noodling. 20min takes to sort thru.
Brilliant!
Great informative video, Bitwig looks very interesting.
operators look awesome!! great idea and implementation!
"Nothing sounds like a loop until it's repeated and then everything sounds like a loop." This is some George Clinton-level wisdom here. I learned a lot from this video, but this is the most important lesson.
Scales and scale lock next please... Some pitch correction (like Logic, Cubase, FL Pro) would also be nice, and get you ahead of Live.
tHIS GUYS IS A GENIUS!
Thanks for showing the new features in version 4. Gonna upgrade soon. Is there an update sale happening?
Sounds like someone at Bitwig recently discovered the Elektron sequencer. The new operator functions seem almost identical to some of the features of a Digitakt.
I was about to get a Digitakt, maybe I should just dig in to Bitwig 👀🤔
Very curious about Bitwig !
It's a cycle, All new DAWs start out being uncluttered, fresh and cool. Then everyone asks for "mo features" and eventually they end up like all the other DAWs, bloated, cluttered and difficult to use. It's why when you want to write some quick text it's easier to open a text editor than a word processor.
@@6581punk Yes, bloatware.. I'm old enough to have witnessed the days of Windows 95 😂 I watched Outlook evolve from a 9mb installer to a 160mb installer. Ps. HUGE fan of text-edit 🤓
@@6581punk very sceptical about that statement
@@6581punk elaborate?
Intriguing. I've been unpleasantly surprised at the performance issues of Ableton 11 on my newly purpose-built PC (i9 9900K, 64GB RAM, 3 SSDs, GTX 1650 GPU, Thunderbolt MOTU interface, latest Win10 fresh install). Can anyone speak to Bitwig's performance and ability to leverage multiple CPU cores/threads? It may be the perfect time for me to try a new DAW.
I guess your mileage may vary applies (as ever). If you have 256 instance of Kontakt player frankly who knows. What I know is a bit about the architecture of Bitwig (from a systems engineer software developer perspective), and my own personal experience on a similar level hardware setup.
Bitwig did something very smart imho and spent a lot of time to get the architecture right from the get go. Probably taking experiences from previous attempts I'm sure.
The thing is Bitwig on some level is, at the foundational level, similar to an operating system... managing resources, distributing and isolating tasks across cores and handling asynchronous communication. Load balancing instruments, whether they be built-in or VST's in sandboxed hosted processes. The upshot of this is the ability to balance machine resources at a pretty granular level, and also provide safeguards so that a badly behaving VST that crashes won't take down the system. I rarely, if ever experience losing work in Bitwig. It is quite bulletproof. The way they approached inter-process communication is also extremely fast using shared memory regions. So the fact VST's are externally hosted from the core process has marginal effect on performance.
But enough technical stuff. It's pretty damn snappy, and I have rarely run into performance issues while producing. The only exception to this might be using a plugin that was designed for offline rendering, but using it in the live mix. Although frankly the fact I can even attempt it is again due to the very good load balancing.
My only issue is that the current rendering technology they are using (esp. on 4k screens), can get a little laggy with multiple monitor setups. That problem popped up somewhere in the late 3.x builds, but it seems like they have worked on that since and I haven't seen it recently. Still a possible concern if you have three 4k monitors with a lot of updates going on, so just mentioning it. This does not affect audio playback in my tests.
All in all I'd say you are going to be quite happy with performance, and I am very impressed and confident the engineering team know what they are doing. I doubt you will have problems with that rig.
Hope this helps.
My experience is that Bitwig gave me a noticable boost in performance and stability with the same hardware coming from Cubase. Also Bitwig seems to give up more gracefully before it runs out of juice, not just start acting up then freeze. Never lost a take in years with 3.2.
I use an oc i9 9900k and I can say it is really hard to kill the cpu with buffer size pulled all the way up. A lot of times I will have the buffer super small and have no idea till much later.
Never crashed ever, sandboxing ftw.
Last, even if you do come to kill it, group all tracks, bounce grouped track and disable will free up all the tracks and now ure cpu starts from scratch. This is so much faster than freezing tracks cuz you only need to bounce one track compared to a bunch of tracks. Bounce once, disable, and move on.
Bitwig seems to run more efficiently on my intel hardware than any of my other Daws, including Ableton, Logic and Reason. Just upgraded to Apple Silicon, m1 Pro MBP and it's no contest ... It seems next generation. The developers are the best in the business, imo ...
@@jumpstar9000 Awesome, thanks everybody. These were exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Wish I'd seen these responses sooner. I'm definitely going to give Bitwig a shot.
Great presentation 👏
something like a "seed history" function would be great so you could go back through the last x number of seeds it there's something i liked. or maybe seeds could be comps
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that assumed midi comping was included when I got into Bitwig. Here we are nearly a year since this video and still no midi comping.
I am sold on BitWig. But where do I get those shelves for gear?? Awesome setup!
Does Bitwig have an auto quantize feature like what us found in Cubase, Reaper, etc.? Talking about the ability for the software to automate the timing correction work flow that is done manually in this video during the comping demonstration. This seems like the one missing feature that is needed tk make Bitwig the perfect all aroubd solution for me, but I would be totally fine with leveraging a thir party plugin to manage this if anyone has recommendations to look into.
I think its time to get on the Bitwig train.
Oh man, it's like edgar varese's DAW!
12:47 how is he able to have the midi notes be different colors?
How would I do to get the resulting flattened clip with all the operators frozen? Is there a command for this or do I have to print it into the arrange window?
Watching this I'm kinda annoyed that I'm so invested in Ableton. These features are something Iv'e wanted from a DAW in a long time.
When do you make a dedicated hardware?
i have every daw and bitwig has the most simplicity..some daws makes it difficult to understand certain things
Nice way to create elevator music.
Awww looks like somebody didn't get to watch their cartoons today
Yeah it can be used to make elevator music and also all other types of music, intuitively!
@@agemxieicheren2193 What can I say? They call me the Elevator King.
Muzak
I like the feel of Bitwig, but it is mostly for hipity hop and EDM. You can't use it for orchestral or anything like that, shame.
You can do whatever you want to do with Bitwig, sure there are better DAWs for orchestral and other genres, but you can do other genres just fine, it's still a full DAW. I do prog rock and jazz fusion and many people do more, give it a go!
@@DrawAndErase Well, not really. You can't freeze tracks, group multitrack MIDI outputs (I dont think), bounce MIDI to stems, MIDI purge, notate scores, plus a number of other minor things which would make it annoying as hell to use for orchestral arranging.
Like I said it's not the best for orchestral stuff but it can handle other genres just fine not just EDM. You can bounce and deactivate tracks which work well, you can group multitrack midi outputs and bounce to separate stems. But yeah I appreciate for that application it's not ideal.
Works fine at jazz for me. But i get it
@@DrawAndErase Would you mind explaining how to do all that? I can bounce MIDI, but it can't be undone like freezing. I would love to see how you stem a MIDI multitrack (aka a Kontakt instrument that has up to 16 extra MIDI tracks pointing to it on different MIDI channels)