What is the future of Bitwig?

[pierb]

Top request: MIDI capture (90 votes) and MIDI comping (88 votes). Head to head apparently. (lol midi comping, that's so funny)

what do you mean midi capture? like midi recording? it can do that though so idk if u mean something else

It's like being able to print MIDI you just played without recording.

See the feature in Live:




I know Cubase also has something similar. Not sure about other DAWs.

[taoyoyo]

Being aware that I am just 'another single voice in the Bitwig wilderness' it would be nice to get more DAW-centric features in Bitwig.

I don't think this would need to be detrimental for the Grid-centric folk among the user-base and it might help retain the users who love the general vibe of Bitwig but who are more 'traditionalists'. Surely there's room for both these user-types to be 'taken care of'?

[pdxindy]

Surely there's room for both these user-types to be 'taken care of'?

I think that is their general long term plan...

[cel4145]

A quick look in the KVR and Reddit forums and it's clear that a majority of the newcomers and advanced musicians are unhappy with Bitwig's priority when it comes to Composer-focused improvement.

It's not only lacking in Midi-Editing features, but many basic Audio manipulation are either way too basic, and poorly maintained. Same goes with the Arrangement view and the File Browser (no advanced search / tagging) that hasn't changed despite all the repetitive requests and detailed posts.

Issue is, if Bitwig only thrive through the niche userbase of sound designers, and keeps catering to them exclusively, it'll get that reputation of the brainy, tweaky DAW to make mosquitoes noise.

It's always painful when you open YouTube and search for Bitwig, most videos are about people making weird noise instead of actually making music.

I see many selling their license when I've DM'ed some of them, same answer pops up: they're missing key features that even younger DAWs like UA Luna has integrated since day one.

Of course the Comping update was a beacon of hope for the musicians / composers, but most updates are really disappointing in these areas, and the lack of improvement on the current features is scaring people away.

The fact that someone had to create a Wishlist site instead of being hosted by the company itself is weird... For any Tech startup. And I'm pretty sure the call they had recently was just about adding warnings that Bitwig had nothing to do with it, that they won't take it into account for their roadmap etc... (I really hope it's not the case but this is my personal guess).

So this thread is relevant. We need more visibility — professionals would never bet on a DAW for the long-term without a roadmap giving the broad strokes of where the product is going.

Well said!

[cel4145]

A quick look in the KVR and Reddit forums and it's clear that a majority of the newcomers and advanced musicians are unhappy with Bitwig's priority when it comes to Composer-focused improvement.

It's not only lacking in Midi-Editing features, but many basic Audio manipulation are either way too basic, and poorly maintained. Same goes with the Arrangement view and the File Browser (no advanced search / tagging) that hasn't changed despite all the repetitive requests and detailed posts.

Issue is, if Bitwig only thrive through the niche userbase of sound designers, and keeps catering to them exclusively, it'll get that reputation of the brainy, tweaky DAW to make mosquitoes noise.

It's always painful when you open YouTube and search for Bitwig, most videos are about people making weird noise instead of actually making music.

I see many selling their license when I've DM'ed some of them, same answer pops up: they're missing key features that even younger DAWs like UA Luna has integrated since day one.

Of course the Comping update was a beacon of hope for the musicians / composers, but most updates are really disappointing in these areas, and the lack of improvement on the current features is scaring people away.

The fact that someone had to create a Wishlist site instead of being hosted by the company itself is weird... For any Tech startup. And I'm pretty sure the call they had recently was just about adding warnings that Bitwig had nothing to do with it, that they won't take it into account for their roadmap etc... (I really hope it's not the case but this is my personal guess).

So this thread is relevant. We need more visibility — professionals would never bet on a DAW for the long-term without a roadmap giving the broad strokes of where the product is going.

Totally agree!

If Bitwig restricted development of the major sound design features to bug fixes and very small refinements through the next interim releases up to version 5. And instead focused 90% of their development time to enhancing basic composing, the sound design crowd would not go anywhere, as Bitwig is already the best virtual playground for them.

[aMUSEd]

Top request: MIDI capture (90 votes) and MIDI comping (88 votes). Head to head apparently. (lol midi comping, that's so funny)

what do you mean midi capture? like midi recording? it can do that though so idk if u mean something else

It's like being able to print MIDI you just played without recording.

See the feature in Live:




I know Cubase also has something similar. Not sure about other DAWs.

Waveform, Logic and Studio One have this too

[cel4145]

That a cool story and all, and maybe you have info I don't, its possible, but there's like 20 (or something, usually the same people) of us here that post regularly.

I see 8.5k members on reddit but I don't see very many of those 8.5k posting and I also don't see an onslaught of give me traditional DAW features in Bitwig posts either. The top post of all time is "Announcing Bitwig Studio 4" with 126 comments.

I have no idea what the majority of those user want, or how many of those 8.5k in fact use Bitwig.


Over at Bitwish, well as of Feb 2022:

1168 votes cast by 251 voters out of (382 users, of the site)
A third of the users hasn’t voted.
Another third has cast between 1 and 4 votes.

Top request: MIDI capture (90 votes) and MIDI comping (88 votes). Head to head apparently. (lol midi comping, that's so funny)

Based on my very unscientific observation I can't say what the majority of Bitwig users want. I don't even know how many Bitwig users there are.

Hey but I have to give props to Bitwish, at least there's some kind stats/data there I can access. Good on Bitwish.

Right. You won't get a feel for why people are not using Bitwig. You are in the echo chambers.

For example on Reddit, I hang out on r/edmproduction. I hear the reasons people decided not to go with Bitwig or switched away from Bitwig. And they come up when someone asks what DAW they should start with or switch to. Or for that matter, I spent a lot of time looking at "the best DAW" google results, where they highlight the best features of a DAW.

It becomes obvious that the way to make Bitwig more attractive to a larger group of people is to improve the basic composing features, as a lot of people spend the majority of their time using them. Not sound designing. And if the arranger or piano roll is improved over the next year, that won't chase away any of the people who are into Bitwig mainly because of its sound design features.

[pierb]

I think that is their general long term plan...

That's my hope, but nothing so far seems to indicate this. My only reason to keep renewing my license is really to support the company, hoping that at some point I will be able to fully transition to Bitwig as a full fledged DAW.

Other than audio comping I don't remember anything not experimental released in the past years.

Again, it's fine if Bitwig just wants to be an experimental DAW. The problem for me is not really knowing where this ship is going.

[FapFilter]

You guys should (or better not) read the Reaper FR forum.

I love Reaper, and while it is absolutely great in most regards, there's of course still things that could (not necessarily need to) improve, but the loudest, most obnoxious posts come from the people who insist! it should FFS be like Bitwig. Sometimes bumping several times a day, complaining how FX containers and modulators modulating modulators should have been there 13 years ago and how they aren't heard by the developers
Completely disregarding how many cool improvements they are getting every couple of weeks for free.

So yeah, for some, such things seemingly can be indeed the most important features ever. It's not enough if just some of their plugins can do this, it needs to be inside Reaper too, otherwise it's seemingly nearly unusable

[j wazza]

If Bitwig restricted development of the major sound design features to bug fixes and very small refinements through the next interim releases up to version 5. And instead focused 90% of their development time to enhancing basic composing, the sound design crowd would not go anywhere, as Bitwig is already the best virtual playground for them.

im all for improved compositional tools but focusing 90% of the time on that would be a bit far imo, i mostly want better sound quality of their effects and instruments

ive never heard of comping tbh, and their lack of midi editing is made up for by the note fx which do the same jobs and are modulatable, it would be nice to have some of cubase's composing features though but doesnt mean they should stop working on anything else, and there are plenty of third party plugins you can use for compositional midi stuff, im mostly keen on them adding stuff that benefits most from being integrated into bitwig's modular system (including but not just the grid), they already have most modular stuff now but the sound quality isn't as good as other modulars

also i could see the future of bitwig going like ableton and reason - third party grid modules/bitwig devices compatible with bitwig's poly and voice stacking features etc, and id love that, it would also free up time for bitwigs devs too

[j wazza]

the main thing ive seen requested on here is msegs

[docbot]

After trying the Note Grid, I think Bitwig is a bit of a lost cause tbh. They constantly do things in a non user friendly way. How can you not connect the Note in to multiple transpose modules and connect them back to the note out to create a chord? Wierd user design decisions like this are all over Bitwig and combine that with the slow graphics performance it's near future doesn't look very bright to me. I rarely open it these days. I hope they can win me back, but I doubt it atm.

[backtomusic]

How can you not connect the Note in to multiple transpose modules and connect them back to the note out to create a chord?

This works if you have several note outs, one per note if I remember correctly

[anttimaatteri]

i just miss three things, abletons capture mode and a note editor to translate from midi to classical notation system or vice versa. the third one is an online coop system. if thats settled bitwig is da bomb

[pdxindy]

I think that is their general long term plan...

That's my hope, but nothing so far seems to indicate this. My only reason to keep renewing my license is really to support the company, hoping that at some point I will be able to fully transition to Bitwig as a full fledged DAW.

Other than audio comping I don't remember anything not experimental released in the past years.

Again, it's fine if Bitwig just wants to be an experimental DAW. The problem for me is not really knowing where this ship is going.

Define experimental...

They just added 3 new FX...
They recently added some orchestral samples...
4.1 updated the Sampler...
4.0 was Comping, much improved export options, new track height zoom functions, perceptual waveform display, ability to import FL Studio and Live project files, M1 support
3.3 was wavetable synthesis, the ability to freely scale content, improved clip and event handling, AVX2 support

None of those things are what I would call experimental features...