spatial audio in Bitwig

[arrakeen]

"Crossfades on clip overlap (Bitwig is light years ahead in so many workflow areas, and I have no idea how they somehow managed to make fades more tedious than almost every other DAW)"

Absolutely, one of my very few gripes with Bitwig. Reaper crossfading is perfect and very useful that you can align transients as you slip the audio, so much clearer than BW. I could not do my day job in Video game sound - engines specifically in Bitwig.

EDIT Typo.

[shadiradio]

Absolutely, one of my very few gripes with Bitwig. Reaper crossfading is perfect and very useful that you can align transients as you slip the audio, so much clearer than BW. I could not do my day job in Video game sound - engines specifically in Bitwig.

I hear you - I also work in game audio and find myself bouncing back and forth between Reaper & Bitwig when working on sounds, I think for the same reason you mentioned. Working on multiple variations for audio cues almost always relies on dropping in variations of samples and slip editing the positions & aligning transients like you said. I suppose in BWS 2.5 you can now slip edit in the arranger? I bought Bitwig on day 1 but haven't felt the need to update for the past 2 point releases (not enough productivity enhancements).

Curious what games/studio you work for.

[arrakeen]

Absolutely, one of my very few gripes with Bitwig. Reaper crossfading is perfect and very useful that you can align transients as you slip the audio, so much clearer than BW. I could not do my day job in Video game sound - engines specifically in Bitwig.

I hear you - I also work in game audio and find myself bouncing back and forth between Reaper & Bitwig when working on sounds, I think for the same reason you mentioned. Working on multiple variations for audio cues almost always relies on dropping in variations of samples and slip editing the positions & aligning transients like you said. I suppose in BWS 2.5 you can now slip edit in the arranger? I bought Bitwig on day 1 but haven't felt the need to update for the past 2 point releases (not enough productivity enhancements).

Curious what games/studio you work for.

Hey, I work at Codemasters, been there for 10 years, I do vehicle engines for our racing games. Our engine system is granular rather than loops and most of the time I have to slip multichannel recordings down at a cylinder-fire level to splice engine sweeps together.

Would drive me nuts in BW.

I saw 2.5 now has a better implementation of slip editing, but audio editing on the timeline is still not as intuitive as Reaper - just push one file into another to crossfade.

Everybody I've seen demo crossfading in BW on YouTube has made it look really awkward - it's the container thing, powerful, but not what I need personally.... or maybe learn to adapt! Hmm.

Anyway, still prefer BW for my music prod hobby, it's my fave DAW of the 5 I own.

[shadiradio]

Hey, I work at Codemasters, been there for 10 years, I do vehicle engines for our racing games. Our engine system is granular rather than loops and most of the time I have to slip multichannel recordings down at a cylinder-fire level to splice engine sweeps together.

Awesome! Since your vehicle audio engine is granular (and I assume more like a realtime sampler based on the dynamic vehicle properties), do you mean this is easier for you to replicate/design in Reaper?

Everybody I've seen demo crossfading in BW on YouTube has made it look really awkward - it's the container thing, powerful, but not what I need personally.... or maybe learn to adapt! Hmm.

No you're not wrong - it *is* that awkward. Not to mention you lose all your fades if you select a bunch of clips and consolidate them (IMO consolidating should never, ever, ever change your sound - it should just simply group items and preserve all your edits).

[ThomasHelzle]

Funny, when the cross-fades were introduced, my very first reaction was, that this is totally non-intuitive. Dom argued against it, but I did not understand his view at all. Blind spot I guess.
But keep bringing it up to support, maybe one day they will change it and it will make sense and work as expected.

Cheers,

Tom

[arrakeen]

Awesome! Since your vehicle audio engine is granular (and I assume more like a realtime sampler based on the dynamic vehicle properties), do you mean this is easier for you to replicate/design in Reaper?

I do nothing more than extract around 30 seconds worth of assets from perhaps 20 mins of multi-channel audio. These being the engine sweeps I need - a sweep being low RPM to Limiter over around 15 seconds and high RPM to idle, again around 15 seconds. Everything else is done via an in-house tool, Wwise and in-game physics.

Having said that, there's lots snipping up, asset grouping (like a BW Clip!), moving audio around and splicing it back together with slip editing and crossfades - using lots of Markers and Region extraction.

Can't imagine how I'd do this in Bitwig, not at even half the speed... and it's just standard audio editing.

Everybody I've seen demo crossfading in BW on YouTube has made it look really awkward - it's the container thing, powerful, but not what I need personally.... or maybe learn to adapt! Hmm.

No you're not wrong - it *is* that awkward. Not to mention you lose all your fades if you select a bunch of clips and consolidate them (IMO consolidating should never, ever, ever change your sound - it should just simply group items and preserve all your edits).

BW works differently, it's a bit too clever for its own good (in my opinion) which leads it to being the most unituative area of Bitwig (again, in my opinion). Check out Baphomerix's great explanation of what's happening on YouTube.

I wish he'd compare to Reaper though

https://youtu.be/YAdpVtj6hck

[arrakeen]

Funny, when the cross-fades were introduced, my very first reaction was, that this is totally non-intuitive. Dom argued against it, but I did not understand his view at all. Blind spot I guess.
But keep bringing it up to support, maybe one day they will change it and it will make sense and work as expected.

Cheers,

Tom

Nice to hear you mentioned it to Dom though Thomas. It's frustrating as Bitwig is perhaps the most intuitive DAW I've used. As for support, it's not gone well with them for me, I'm reluctant to get into another email match / argument with them over something right now.... one day, when I have the energy.

[shadiradio]

Funny, when the cross-fades were introduced, my very first reaction was, that this is totally non-intuitive. Dom argued against it, but I did not understand his view at all. Blind spot I guess.
But keep bringing it up to support, maybe one day they will change it and it will make sense and work as expected.

Cheers,

Tom

Nice to hear you mentioned it to Dom though Thomas. It's frustrating as Bitwig is perhaps the most intuitive DAW I've used. As for support, it's not gone well with them for me, I'm reluctant to get into another email match / argument with them over something right now.... one day, when I have the energy.

Same here - I love the team and what they've done, and trust them to innovate in a lot of areas. I've also had mixed results with emailing back and forth (some long chains). I put in my request about overlapping fades a long time ago, and got them to at least concede that many operations should happen on mouse-down instead of mouse-up for responsiveness (moving the playhead, etc) but nothing came of that.

[MidiBo$$]

Your work around method works great. I hope that bitwig will one day do a quad, 5.1, 7.1 etc XY panning GUI box option in place of the L/R panning on the tracks fader as like in Cubase Pro, Digital Performer when you want to do quad,5.1 etc panning.. Only hope they have it as one there feature to do lists.

[ThomasHelzle]

I actually hope they will go the full way to ambisonics natively if they go multichannel.
Those old 5.1 etc. formats are usually only volume based panning, which is rather on the low-tech side these days. If you have a chance to test Reaper with the ATK or another real ambisonic solution, it's a major leap ahead - and you can basically export to whatever format/number of channels you need by just flipping a switch.
And ambisonics/binaural is the way forward for VR/AR/Games as well as movies...

Cheers,

Tom

[MidiBo$$]

I actually hope they will go the full way to ambisonics natively if they go multichannel.
Those old 5.1 etc. formats are usually only volume based panning, which is rather on the low-tech side these days. If you have a chance to test Reaper with the ATK or another real ambisonic solution, it's a major leap ahead - and you can basically export to whatever format/number of channels you need by just flipping a switch.
And ambisonics/binaural is the way forward for VR/AR/Games as well as movies...

Cheers,

Tom

Roger That.. I Concur.

[ThomasHelzle]

Today I finally tried out something I wanted to solve for a long time:
In my surround setup, I use Wave NX to build a binaural headphone mix from my 5.1 channels.
So far I was only able to use the Front and Rear Channels though, since I could only get at two normal channels from the track and two additional ones with the sidechain.
Since Waves NX in the 5.1 version expects the Rear Channels on input 5 & 6, I had to use Plogue Bidule in the 16 channel version and in there map the first two channels to the front and the sidechain to the rear inputs of NX

Now today I finally tried out reastream from the ReaPlugs collection: https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
I put the sending instance in my Center + LFE output track and the receiver into Plogue Bidule, routing it's output to NX.
And: it works! Now I have the full 5.1 mixdown on headphones and it sound rather good to me

5.1 to Binaural Bitwig.jpg

As was said before: not a solution for "serious" surround/ambisonic work, but great if you just like to be "in the sound".

Cheers,

Tom

P.S. Anybody knows of a good free or affordable Surround to Binaural plugin that isn't from Waves? I'd rather not use anything from them, but IRCAM HEar which I also have just isn't very good...

[lokanchung]

P.S. Anybody knows of a good free or affordable Surround to Binaural plugin that isn't from Waves? I'd rather not use anything from them, but IRCAM HEar which I also have just isn't very good...

Panorama 6 is great but it's not cheap

[ThomasHelzle]

Thanks lokanchung.
Yeah, that's a bit out of my pricerange.
Sadly, I can get the Reaper ATK only working inside of Reaper, although in theory it should work in ReaJS, but all the scripts that need kernels don't work - especially the SuperStereo encoder is magic.
I tried a lot of things with absolute paths etc. but something seems to be missing in ReaJS that Reaper does...
And the project is dead it seems, both the ATK and the ReaPlugs are quite old.

Well, one day...

[hockinsk3]

Just found this page. I've been dabbling with Dolby Atmos & Mach1 Spatial & Bitwig for a while seeing what sort of workflow is possible. I've taken a slightly different approach than trying to do it all in Bitwig. I basically take advantage of Bitwig's VST multiple output chain capability and use a VST Mach1 or 7.1.4 Panner and then their multichannel output chains get taken into an FX Grid and with Audio Receiver & HW Out patch them to either Mach1 Spatial Monitor or Dolby Atmos Renderer for recording/printing.
A brief demo here of using the 7.1.4 output panning from DearVR Pro which I've just realised will happily output to 7.1.4 even though not on a 7.1.4 track/bus. The trick is to work out what combination of Plogue Bidule VST and VST2/3 of the panners get you the outputs how you need them. In this Video I simply route the 7.1.4 psuedo bus to Davinci Resolve 7.1.4 input and then that handles taking it to the renderer. Works really well, but of course if we have multi-in and multi-out devices/vst it would all be more of a streamlined workflow and more could be done in bitwig too. This DAW + Renderer approach is similar to how studios mixing on consoles would do it in fact. Bob Clearmountain runs his SSL into Dolby Atmos Renderer and simply has the desk set up to do basic panning into the fixed 7.1.4 object beds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Y0UKGWdLs