My impression is, that there simply is a huge crowd of frustrated people here.
People who in one way or other are making music or want to and are not totally successful with it - for whatever reason.
(I can't imagine that there are too many really successful musicians taking part in "those" threads - they have work to do).
Now if you are not successful or not really making music, it is very easy in this day and age to blame that on the tools.
A lot of anger can be generated that way.
I've seen the same in the 3D industry for many many years - people (me included) get into a rage because their tool doesn't have this feature or that, crashes in this situation or creates errors in that.
All this while somebody else is playing happily on a crappy guitar the most beautiful things and doesn't give a dungbeatles dreamball about if there is -150 dB of hiss or if the phase is half a degree off.
The Bitwig threads are a great example for that.
People with no knowledge about how involved programming something like this really is, get themselves into a frenzy how long it takes.
Those same people go into another frenzy if version 1.0 doesn't have all the features that they use in software that is at version 9 or whatever, isn't 100% stable or differs half a % in performance...
There is all the talk about how similar Bitwig is to Ableton Live and that this is cheating and bad and overall immoral.
But then again some people expect BW to have everything that Live, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One etc. has, basically in exactly the same form or "they won't use it".
And if it will cost more than 99.-$ it's an outrage!
Conclusion: Humans are very funny and a really lovable bunch - most of the time.
But to help those who forgot: it works like this:
Bitwig is Software (TM).
Some things will not be to your personal liking and others you may find yourself floored by.
Some solutions you will like better in other software and some you would be happy to have in that same other software.
It will perform perfectly on some systems and for some peoples needs and less perfect on/for others.
Some people will like it and others won't.
Will it be the DAW to end all DAWs? No.
Will it solve world hunger or create peace? No.
Will it make yourself a better person, husband, musician, entertainer, father, artist, friend? No.
What it WILL do: Some people will like the workflow, certain features will inspire them, certain ideas will make them happy.
It finally may give Live a sparing partner (which it is in dire need of IMHO).
It will bring the whole industry one notch forward in the overall hunt for perfection and better tools.
Like every other new tool and solution.
Now regarding the questions about the beta:
I'm happy to talk about it and explain how some things work, but I'll only do so if I find the question reasonable, friendly and interesting.
See, this is still in beta and evolving.
Even without a NDA, I feel inclined to be a bit reluctant with certain information I don't know is final yet.
It's not that as a beta tester you have all the knowledge about the software or all information about what may be planned in the future.
With that said:
As for Layers/Groups/Racks: As was said already, you have the Instrument Layer Tool that allows you to drop as many instruments into it as you want (each with it's own device chain, effects etc.). There also is an FX Layer tool that does the same for FX-only groups. Those can be saved as presets, so I think we're covered there?
I haven't looked into Drumracks yet.
Can anybody point out a VST3 Synth that supports per note modulation? I'd be happy to give it a try.
Overall routing looks similar to Live to me so far. You can tell each track what output it should use, can create return tracks, can define a cue/preview output...
So much for the moment from me.
Cheers and Carpe Diem everybody
Tom
