Does Bitwig seem like a daw that very few people want? Kind of a rant I guess.

[kurt008]

To be honest: I have been a fan of Bitwig Studio for many years now... I own a full license since late 2016 and ... I like many features of it...
But throughout the years I also have found myself making steps forward, reaching several limitations of Bitwig Studio and unfortunately I often (if not always) found the meanwhile not only by myself criticized limitations being a consequence of Bitwigs very unsustainable software maintenance. Their policy obviously prefers to gain new customers all the time, but at the price of disappointing and discouraging existing users non-stop. As a person who develops my musical experience over time I expect a software, which 'develops' similarly, making workarounds more and more unnecessary. But instead more and more workarounds are needed to not be disappointed more and more - and this is even connected with an expectation of gaining more and more money - a calculation, I'm personally not satisfied with and I explicitly dislike. I cannot work in this short-sighted manner myself either, if I don't want to get kicks in my butt and ... in the end loose money. I'm personally about to look for another, more professional maintained DAW like Studio 1 or Waveform Tracktion (because I'm on Linux and will remain on this OS). I go on following Bitwigs way for some time, but... should I find myself be able to realize projects in the named DAW's more easily and with less flaw-based obstacles than in Bitwig Studio, I'll kick the license. Because... like no other software I know Bitwig is reacting to very little feedback..... and weaknesses are even neglected completely, as long as the well-known "Bitwig-experts" like Polarity and similar persons can live with them (what in my experience mostly is the case - good for them, bad for my remaining time with Bitwig).

Don't misunderstand me: Personally, I'm happy for Polarity and similar "fans" of Bitwig and their connection to and relationship with Bitwig. But unfortunately, this doesn't help me at all with my own projects. So as I mentioned I expect to try out Waveform and Studio 1 this year... most likely together with VCV Rack pro. Should this combination work for me better than Bitwig Studio - good bye Bitwig, otherwise I will stay with it until this happens some day in the future.

Please ellaborate. At least with 1 or 2 examples

In short: The internal devices are simply very neglected. As an example:
FM4, the FM synth inside BS, still only offers triangle waves as available oscillator shapes and its modulation matrix still is unreachable for any kind of automation.
The once highly hyped sampler still cannot slice a sample according to onsets or e.g. it still is not possible to to precisely define slices, which can be started by e.g. the steps modulator. Even though this sampler allows the use as "wave table synth", this wave table can not be further processed implicitly (except in a very basic manner by moving the position of the play head using a modulator). Similarly the grain synth mode still misses any significant additional processing - everything inside the sampler is in the same basic style as it was at the day of it's introduction (what has happened quite some days ago...),
inside The Grid (where really a whole bunch of flaws exist) the whole phase thing doesn't work consistently and is unable to reproduce audio without errors, which are audible when repeating parts under specific conditions, there is still not even a basic usable, free of massive latency introduction feed back available - this concerns each device inside the "famous" Grid,.... and so forth.
In other words: If you really prefer to read such a lengthy list, I can increase it until really no one is willing to go on reading it...
So these points are a few of many!.

I hope, you see at least, I don't simply repeat other users mentions... I have found enough by myself in several use cases.
One point also annoyed me a lot:
There is still no possibility to modulate any Grid-device by linear FM - only PM works or (as an also mentioned workaround) there's something needed to mathematically change the PM signal to FM (what according to my knowledge also doesn't work and yes, PM and FM do sound quite different, what especially in basses is very well audible... but I wanted to stop counting up annoyances, as this becomes really a 'bad habit' meanwhile).

[machinesworking]

IMO one of the issues with humans and DAWs is that we all want the DAW we envision in our heads, and it's not the same vision that the other 10K+ uses of that DAW want. kurt008 you mention mostly the Grid and built in instruments, that's not even close to the reason I personally don't use Bitwig. I've never concerned myself with instruments and FX in a DAW but more with the limitations of the DAW features specifically. I really like Bitwig, but I need more surgical MIDI editing tools, articulation management, arrangement features than what Bitwig offers.

The difference though is I realize that Bitwig offers some flat out amazing things, it's virtually crash proof, the key commands it has are well thought out, they're very concerned with modern ideas like CLAP and DAWProject, it's extensible and Möss among others has opened up all kinds of control surfaces for it, it works in Linux, and it's constantly developed. Now it might not be getting new features you or I personally want, but that's IMO always going to be the case for some of the end users, it's how it works, if it got articulation management in the next update a large portion of the user base would be mad their feature request went unimplemented.

[Cyoon]

Bitwig..best DAW eva, all others lost.

[Tendou]

To be honest: I have been a fan of Bitwig Studio for many years now... I own a full license since late 2016 and ... I like many features of it...
But throughout the years I also have found myself making steps forward, reaching several limitations of Bitwig Studio and unfortunately I often (if not always) found the meanwhile not only by myself criticized limitations being a consequence of Bitwigs very unsustainable software maintenance. Their policy obviously prefers to gain new customers all the time, but at the price of disappointing and discouraging existing users non-stop. As a person who develops my musical experience over time I expect a software, which 'develops' similarly, making workarounds more and more unnecessary. But instead more and more workarounds are needed to not be disappointed more and more - and this is even connected with an expectation of gaining more and more money - a calculation, I'm personally not satisfied with and I explicitly dislike. I cannot work in this short-sighted manner myself either, if I don't want to get kicks in my butt and ... in the end loose money. I'm personally about to look for another, more professional maintained DAW like Studio 1 or Waveform Tracktion (because I'm on Linux and will remain on this OS). I go on following Bitwigs way for some time, but... should I find myself be able to realize projects in the named DAW's more easily and with less flaw-based obstacles than in Bitwig Studio, I'll kick the license. Because... like no other software I know Bitwig is reacting to very little feedback..... and weaknesses are even neglected completely, as long as the well-known "Bitwig-experts" like Polarity and similar persons can live with them (what in my experience mostly is the case - good for them, bad for my remaining time with Bitwig).

Don't misunderstand me: Personally, I'm happy for Polarity and similar "fans" of Bitwig and their connection to and relationship with Bitwig. But unfortunately, this doesn't help me at all with my own projects. So as I mentioned I expect to try out Waveform and Studio 1 this year... most likely together with VCV Rack pro. Should this combination work for me better than Bitwig Studio - good bye Bitwig, otherwise I will stay with it until this happens some day in the future.

Please ellaborate. At least with 1 or 2 examples

In short: The internal devices are simply very neglected. As an example:
FM4, the FM synth inside BS, still only offers triangle waves as available oscillator shapes and its modulation matrix still is unreachable for any kind of automation.
The once highly hyped sampler still cannot slice a sample according to onsets or e.g. it still is not possible to to precisely define slices, which can be started by e.g. the steps modulator. Even though this sampler allows the use as "wave table synth", this wave table can not be further processed implicitly (except in a very basic manner by moving the position of the play head using a modulator). Similarly the grain synth mode still misses any significant additional processing - everything inside the sampler is in the same basic style as it was at the day of it's introduction (what has happened quite some days ago...),
inside The Grid (where really a whole bunch of flaws exist) the whole phase thing doesn't work consistently and is unable to reproduce audio without errors, which are audible when repeating parts under specific conditions, there is still not even a basic usable, free of massive latency introduction feed back available - this concerns each device inside the "famous" Grid,.... and so forth.
In other words: If you really prefer to read such a lengthy list, I can increase it until really no one is willing to go on reading it...
So these points are a few of many!.

I hope, you see at least, I don't simply repeat other users mentions... I have found enough by myself in several use cases.
One point also annoyed me a lot:
There is still no possibility to modulate any Grid-device by linear FM - only PM works or (as an also mentioned workaround) there's something needed to mathematically change the PM signal to FM (what according to my knowledge also doesn't work and yes, PM and FM do sound quite different, what especially in basses is very well audible... but I wanted to stop counting up annoyances, as this becomes really a 'bad habit' meanwhile).

I read it, thx for that. However im not on bitwig right now and im interested in it thats why I asked. Those things seem like advanced features (excluding the slicer thing) which probably wont bother me bc I rely more heavily on third party plugins.

[v4p0r]

I like Bitwig but I'm not good at it. I think it works great for live performing or certain ways of making music, and I'm a little weird in any case, so when I tried it again a few years ago, I felt a little overwhelmed by it. And probably by many other DAWS, too.

[koalaboy]

I think many people underestimate the power of the modulators and ease with which you can just drag/drop to achieve things.

Going back to Studio One for a while, which I agree seems to have a 'cleaner' feel such that many things feel 'easier' - hard to explain - and yet I have to jump through hoops to add a MIDI processor like Scalar in front of a Synth (use two tracks) and can't easily add a slow LFO to something (have to hand-draw automation, or use another audio effect, etc.).

Just two examples that in Bitwig I don't need to think about. Live gets close, but still suffers with the MIDI thing. Reason works just fine, but then the 'look/feel' for many is even worse.

Bitwig, for most things, "Just Works". Sure, no nice way for note-expressions/sound-variations for orchestral composition (I said 'easy', not impossible') or score view, the audio editing 'feels' less comprehensive than Cubase for example, the grid is awesome but just begs for user modules, the 'expanded' view is limited to a few devices and adds lots of value. The list goes on, but that doesn't make Bitwig 'bad' in any way - just has so much potential to become 'the best' in many ways.

(Oh, and it really needs to be able to set all plugins to 'do not stretch' by default, whilst still allowing that option, but hey)

I look forward to it continuing in the vision of the developers and hopefully it won't be bought up by some bigger company and then have splice integration or something... that's the problem with todays DAWs.

[xbitz]

^^^ Modulat is pretty versatile in Live too, for ex. the Spread module

[koalaboy]

^^^ Modulat is pretty versatile in Live too, for ex. the Spread module

I love the look/feel of Modulat much more than the Grid. I appreciate it's subjective, but for me it just feels so much easier to use.

[D-Fusion]

I own alot of Daws and have sold a few over the years and Bitwig is still my go to Daw because of my HW synth setup.
It is not perfect when it comes to program change.
Other daws have scripts that you can create with preset names so you can easily browse presets in the same way you do with a vst but where Bitwig shines for me is that it has audio latency compensation for my hardware when you use the HW instrument container instead of pure audio and midi track.

Other daws needs alot of tweaking and fiddling to get the audio to line up correctly while Bitwig is plug and play and it just works and stay in sync with my vst's.

So it is perfect for me and how i use my Hybrid setup + I know it so well now that i can do what i want quickly.
If my setup was 100% vst's and i had to change to another Daw i would move over to Studio one.

[tumface]

I love the look/feel of Modulat much more than the Grid. I appreciate it's subjective, but for me it just feels so much easier to use.

Yep. I especially feel this way about Bitwig's modulator system. Extremely powerful, at a technical level: sample-accurate, audio-rate, delay-compensated, route-from-to-anwhere... but it's kind crummy to actually interact with.

Let's say you have a modulator, like an LFO, and you want to modulate some Volume knob on a Tool device between silent and 0.0db.

OK, first enter modulation assignment mode by clicking the little horizontal sliver at the bottom part of the modulator. The little sliver that's a click target doesn't have its hit box/boundary box displayed until you hover over it, by the way, so you have to wait an extra fraction of a moment for your eyes to register whether the mouse cursor is over the right area when you hover over it. OK, in assignment mode, click and drag some amount on the Volume knob to create the assignment. But you can't actually click and drag to set the modulation range exactly between 0.0db and -inf/silent. The modulation assignment stops at "-2.0" which is double the range beyond -inf/silent. And there's no detent or snap point at -inf. So, you have to drag some arbitrary amount to create the assignment. Then you have to either right-click the little sliver area that enters/exits modulation mode, or move your mouse to the top-right of the screen where the inspector panel is, find the assignment row that you just created (which gets harder and harder the more assignments you create) and then control-click it, then type "-1.0" (which means -inf/silent on the Tool's Volume knob, apparently -- but only when doing modulation assignment editing! If you type -1.0 as an actual data entry on the Volume knob itself, it will set it to -1.0db of gain, not silent.) And then hit enter. And now don't forget to exit modulation assignment mode for that Volume knob. OK, now do a dance like that for every time you modulate something, except you have to pay attention to the range rules for every knob, since they each have different rules, instead of "-2.0" or whatever.

Also, if you have multiple modulators, their little slide-open panels will keep opening and closing while you're trying to do things, moving all of the UI to the right in your rack around. You can alt-click to try to keep multiple open at once, but one wrong click and they will all slide shut. Also, it won't be saved with your project, so you'll have to reopen them all each time.

In Live, you click the map button on the modulator, and then click a knob, and it picks a default range, and exits map mode.

Is Bitwig's behavior the end of the world? No, but that kind of clunkiness makes me not want to actually use the modulation system.

[xbitz]

^^^ And of course, in Live, an External Instrument placed in one of the chains of an Instrument Rack can see the MIDI note-triggerable FX further down the track (even if it’s placed in another chain, the shared macro mapping works too), like Serum2 FX, and then you can get along pretty well here too — MSEGs and LFOs are available. In most cases, this already provides enough room for sound design, and it doesn’t kill the portability of the project either.


... nobody wants to learn all the quirks of every DAW’s fxs anyway

Anyway, Bitwig played its part in whipping the already complacent Live development back into shape, and for that everyone can only be grateful, let every flower bloom — that’s only good for us

[Tj Shredder]

Please ellaborate. At least with 1 or 2 examples

In short: The internal devices are simply very neglected. As an example:
FM4, the FM synth inside BS, still only offers triangle waves as available oscillator shapes and its modulation matrix still is unreachable for any kind of automation.

Its meant as a simple synth and its sine waves of course not triangles. There is no need to update it, its the teaser of the mostly free 8-track version. Phase-4 is the real thing

The once highly hyped sampler still cannot slice a sample according to onsets or e.g. it still is not possible to to precisely define slices, which can be started by e.g. the steps modulator.

You can slice in the track and it creates a multisample

inside The Grid (where really a whole bunch of flaws exist) the whole phase thing doesn't work consistently and is unable to reproduce audio without errors, which are audible when repeating parts under specific conditions, there is still not even a basic usable, free of massive latency introduction feed back available - this concerns each device inside the "famous" Grid,.... and so forth.

I agree to a certain extent as I know whats possible in Max/Pd, often its more complicated, but also often its way easier.

There is still no possibility to modulate any Grid-device by linear FM - only PM works or (as an also mentioned workaround) there's something needed to mathematically change the PM signal to FM (what according to my knowledge also doesn't work and yes, PM and FM do sound quite different, what especially in basses is very well audible...

This is only because you don‘t understand the mathematics behind it. PM creates simply frequency linear FM. The result is exactly the same. What you call FM is pitch linear and not frequency linear thats the reason why it sounds different!
Pitch is an exponential function to frequency… In analog synths you get 5V/octave control signals for the pitch which is exponential to the frequency. That is very different to the FM of the DX7… The method to get frequency linear modulation is PM, but the result would be the same… The oscillators of the Grid do have a pitch input you can use that for pitch linear or exponential FM…
I am not the „producer“ kind of musician who is focused on efficiency. I need a tool that not only does the job, but is also inspiring. And that is a matter of taste and not a matter of absolute truth…
Its more interesting to read about why a certain tool is good and why I use it, than hearing why I don‘t like it. Disliking is mostly based on a lack of experience with that tool…

[babaji]

Last few years of updates have been all about Bitwig's own devices and expanding The Grid, which is cool and all, but it feels like some massive, core workflow stuff has been completely ignored. And I think that's why it hasn't truly broken through to the top tier of DAWs.

My biggest gripes, and the things that make me tempted to switch sometimes:

No Video Track. Seriously, in 2025? This is a huge dealbreaker. I'm not even a full-time film composer, but I do a lot of sound design for short clips, ads, etc. The whole "use a VST workaround" suggestion is just a clunky, unstable mess. It just walls Bitwig off from a massive part of the industry.

The lack of ARA support. This one kills me on a daily basis. Trying to do serious vocal editing with Melodyne or VocAlign is like stepping back in time 10 years. In Reaper, Cubase or Studio One, it's just seamless. This alone makes projects with heavy vocals so much more tedious in Bitwig.

The Piano Roll is just.. meh. It works, sure. You can enter notes. But compare it to something like FL Studio or even Logic's recent updates. There are no modern compositional tools to speak of, no chord generation tools, nothing to help you get ideas down faster. It feels like an afterthought, which is crazy for a DAW that's otherwise so creative.

I'm still rooting for them, but I really hope the devs take a step back from building new synths for a cycle and focus on these massive workflow gaps.

[xbitz]

^^^
but meantime the whole system (ui render, mixer, browser, audio engine) has been rewritten and only the piano roll-arranger combo is last remaining core part - I assume this depends on the others, so it's obviously not a coincidence. ( It might very well be a conspiracy theory, but it seems to me that they let user requests pile up because they already anticipated there would be a surge in demand after the big rewrite)

Engine & Rendering Overhaul

* Bitwig Studio 5.2 (July 25, 2024) included a new rendering engine—described by users as a long‑running project ("the real gold") to support future features and improve performance across the DAW

Modulation System and Curve Devices

* Bitwig Studio 5.0 (June 29, 2023) introduced the MSEG Family, a complete redesign of modulation workflows with fully drawable envelope curves and modulators available at track/project level

Browser & Interface Improvements

* Version 5.0 also brought reborn browser architecture, upgraded preset/project handling, plus performance gestures and grid enhancements, signaling broader UI/system restructuring

Audio/MIDI Infrastructure & Workflow Enhancements

* Through 5.1, 5.2, and especially 5.3 (February 19, 2025), significant under‑the‑hood improvements were implemented—faster project load times, more robust audio system setup (auto‑configuration/fallback devices), Windows ARM support, and modular Grid module updates

- from the release notes

[_leras]

I'm still rooting for them, but I really hope the devs take a step back from building new synths for a cycle and focus on these massive workflow gaps.

Even with workflow gaps, it's still easily the most fluid and productive DAW.

For me it's fantastic to make music with. It mainly stays out of the way.