Objective Differences: Ableton Live 9.5 vs Bitwig?

[rod_zero]

....but don't be surprised if (as hinted) Live do something mind-blowing for 'Live X' they have been collecting 'most requested features' via a voting poll for over a year now and haven't yet implemented any- I expect at least the top 10 to make the next version....

In fact they have implemented a few, most related to Push but some other like exporting options, RMS meters, and finally implemeting PDC for automated parameters.

As for when Live X will be out, probably more than a year.

[elxsound]

The question is how far away is Live X. It is hard to go by release times. It used to be a year between major releases. When they started their point updates it got even longer. Live 9.2 was released this summer with a HUGE fix, namely PDC. Now we just got Live 9.5 which is one of the largest feature packed "free" point updates. Push 2 will generate capitol EASILY for a few years.

So I am not so sure when we will see Live X. More than a year possibly?

Yeah I would echo Rod_zero on this too... Probably more than a year.

The next announced major feature is Link, which looks amazing. And they seem to be fine tuning features, so I really doubt they'd drop version 10 before a year.

@Ogopogo.... great summary comparison. I'm not a BW user, but there are loads of features I wish could be implemented in Live, and of course there are features (specific to my needs) that are not yet there in BW version 1 (that probably won't affect the OP, so no point in mentioning here).

I'd also suggest the same advice.... If you like a specific workflow, then go with that.

Workflow to me is everything, because I'm more interested in the end product than anything else and having to deal with workflow killers, or obstacles just takes too much away to be worthwhile.

*This is even more important if this host (BW vs Live) is not going to be your primary host. I would think you want the one that can fired up to scratch out an idea quickly before moving back to your primary host. If Bitwig does that for you, then I would think it is an easy choice to go in that direction.

***Edited to add one more thing....

[ThomasHelzle]

I keep this list for reference:

Why Bigwig Studio:

- The modulation system is ace. I hated everything about the way you assign even a simple M4L LFO in Live...
And one modulation source can modulate multiple targets in varying +/- amounts...

- ALT-A to activate/deactivate tracks, layers and devices so they no longer use CPU.

- Have clips on sends and even the master (for instance for project tempo or effect automation)...

- Having the clip launcher next to the arranger (optional) and being able per-track to either play clips or arrangement tracks and switch fluidly between them is how it always should have been IMO.

- I do not want track headers on the right. Call me silly, but I find Lives track headers in arranger totally annoying and confusing.

- I totally love to work with Midi VSTs. Being able to put as many of them in one device chain is bliss. Being able to put audio effects in front, to for instance improve the guitar input for Midi Guitar from Jam Origins conversion to midi, then mangle that midi with VSTs, then put instruments and more effects, all in one chain...

- I test a lot of VSTs, some of them not so stable. In BWS I can sandboxing each VST, and if one crashes, nothing happens other than that the GUI goes away and is replaced with buttons to restart the VST. The application never crashes because of a plugin.

- Unplug a midi controller, re-plug it, BWS reconnects instantly. Not a common behaviour on Windows

- Install a VST while BWS is running, see it pop up in the browser and use it right away.

- The whole architecture is very clever: There is only one Bitwig launcher. The GUI is written in Java and running in 32 Bit (since 64 makes no difference there). But the audio and midi engine is always running in the most optimal bit depth, so if your OS is 64 bit, it is running in 64 Bit and can use all your memory. And finally plugins can run either in individual or combined threads, allowing to either prioritize stability or performance (although even the per-plugin sandboxing is very performant and hard to notice at all). Bottom line: you can pretty much forget about the whole 32/64 Bit business, BWS takes care of it.

- Multiple VST folders...

- The new track groups can contain track groups can contain track groups... They can also have local send tracks. This allows to import full projects as groups into other projects....

- Having multiple projects open at the same time and drag and drop between them, use one tab as sample collection or idea sketchboard. Drag devices, whole tracks, single or multiple clips, groups...

- VSTs and libraries are scanned in the background, so BWS starts very fast (4-6 seconds here from SSD), even if you installed a bunch of new VSTs.

- Audio rate modulation for all BWS factory devices. You can actually build VERY snappy custom compressors with the Audio-Mod device and for instance the EQ 5...

- Multi-Layer-Automation: Record you normal Automation and then have additive and multiplicative automation curves on top, allowing you to "modulate" your original recording with a much simpler curve.

- Audio and Midi receiver devices. Receive Audio and Midi from everywhere (very finegrained) in your project. This allows for instance to use BWS for surround sound although it only has stereo tracks...

- Layered Clip editing: select multiple clips/tracks and see/edit all the midi at once (audio is a bit different but also possible).

- Per Note expressions for Polyphonic Aftertouch and MPE for controllers like the Seaboard, LinnStrument, Eigenharp etc. (Now also for VSTs).

- Hybrid Tracks: Have Audio and Midi clips on the same track. YES.

- Edit audio inside one clip, copy and paste parts of one audio clip inside of another. Only thing missing is crossfades, but otherwise you can do all the microediting you want inside individual clips.

- Have Clips on sends and on the master - very handy for automation clips and such.

- Bounce in place: select a clip or a certain amount of time and bounce it to audio right on the track it comes from (but you can also bounce to a new track).

- Support for 1, 2 or 3 monitors and in 1.3 there even is a multitouch layout (developed together with Microsoft for the Surface 4 but works for all touch monitors on Windows and Linux).

- Windows, OSX, Linux. Actually opening up the Linux market for more serious audio work. The developer who ported the u-he plugins to Linux now is part of the Bitwig team...

Love it

Cheers,

Tom

[liquidsound]

One thing BitWig has done that it's good for us Live's users is...
"Awakening the sleeping giant."
But we may have to wait for Live X and see if Live got out of bed.

[Daags]

the gui isn't resizable in bitwig, making it unusable on a 1366x768 resolution monitor. which is, imo, a massive oversight on their part since it's a common resolution limit on midspec laptops. they outright, point-blank refused to prioritize addressing this in a 1.* update.

ok then, will wait until version 2 whenever that is. what a pity to be excluded from using a software my machine could easily run, owing to the fact the gui is unworkably massive at this resolution.

[Ogopogo]

the gui isn't resizable in bitwig, making it unusable on a 1366x768 resolution monitor. which is, imo, a massive oversight on their part since it's a common resolution limit on midspec laptops. they outright, point-blank refused to prioritize addressing this in a 1.* update.

ok then, will wait until version 2 whenever that is. what a pity to be excluded from using a software my machine could easily run, owing to the fact the gui is unworkably massive at this resolution.

I've played with it at that resolution and I wouldn't call it unusable. It certainly is cramped, though. Bitwig's gui does scaleup, but not down. Do a lot of program scale down? I know ableton does but it looks like crap when I try it here. That's pretty much what I would expect from other programs too, unless they were on a retina screen I guess.

[Daags]

the gui isn't resizable in bitwig, making it unusable on a 1366x768 resolution monitor. which is, imo, a massive oversight on their part since it's a common resolution limit on midspec laptops. they outright, point-blank refused to prioritize addressing this in a 1.* update.

ok then, will wait until version 2 whenever that is. what a pity to be excluded from using a software my machine could easily run, owing to the fact the gui is unworkably massive at this resolution.

I've played with it at that resolution and I wouldn't call it unusable. It certainly is cramped, though. Bitwig's gui does scaleup, but not down. Do a lot of program scale down? I know ableton does but it looks like crap when I try it here. That's pretty much what I would expect from other programs too, unless they were on a retina screen I guess.

what does 'played with it' mean exactly ? fiddled about briefly ? or actually tried to work on a meaningful project ? and we don't need to be talking about 100s of scenes here. even 4 would be unworkable (it displays three at a time compared to Abletons 13 for an identical setup. actually, no, bitwig only displays three scenes when using a paltry two sends. expect it to lose a scene if you would add another send or two), it would just prove so counter intuitive that any usability gains you might have from using the software are completely thrown out the window and you are actually worse off than using any of the alternatives. much worse off.

ableton scales down just fine. it might depend on the percentage though, if I recall correctly. for example 76% might look better than 75 and 77, and yet 74 will look just as good as 76 (albeit smaller), and so on ... you'll find sweet/ugly spots as you sift through the range.

with Ableton at 76% (which looks great btw, it looks absolutely identical in terms of resolution to 100% - if I would post a screenshot you would not be able to tell the difference in terms of quality) I can fit 23 tracks in session view, with 13 scenes each, with all the track data available (i.e faders, sends, etc) ....and the bottom section open too which can display 10 velocity devices, for example. This is over double what I can get to display on bitwig, in terms of track count and native device guis. But it's moot anyway since displaying a paltry 3 scenes is a show stopper in terms of its usefullness, or gaining anything over Ableton.

if it could display at least, say, 10 scenes.... the 50% track/device count would be doable ... but 3 scenes, and half or less of everything else ? .... useless.

it just surprises me that they did this, and didn't think it important enough to rectify in a 1.* release (it gets fixed in 2, i think ? it's been so long since I asked i forget)... I guess they know the figures better than me but I'd have thought excluding such a big chunk of midspec laptop users would be foolish. I'm not even asking for scalability, even preset smaller gui sizes would be fine.

anyway. add it to the list of objective differences, and the only reason I don't currently own a bitwig license despite having followed it's development since the very earliest days.

[tooneba]

....but don't be surprised if (as hinted) Live do something mind-blowing for 'Live X' they have been collecting 'most requested features' via a voting poll for over a year now and haven't yet implemented any- I expect at least the top 10 to make the next version....

More reason to not upgrade to 8 to mediocre 9 at this point. Release 10 already!

[Ogopogo]

@Daags I count 5 scenes vs 7; that's with the inputs open. Would be a much bigger difference with the inputs closed because Live's input section is so huge. So, yeah, true, it's a fairly big difference. The device lane is what really takes the hit in Bitwig. But you can keep the inspector closed a lot of the time and use the pop-up browser instead of the normal browser. If they just tweaked a few things you wouldn't have to open the inspector or the normal browser at all if you didn't want to. Hopefully they'll get around to that. I find Bitwig's edit view really makes a difference on a small screen.





Ableton at 76% zoom looks poopalicious.



Edited this post multiple times because originally I sized the windows wrong.

[SLiC]

You really don't need the browser open now with the new pop up browser, so BWS will actually squeeze in quite a few more scenes (and that's with the inspector that Live Doesn't have, the inspector view, so you could turn that off as well!

[xbitz]

Bitwig shortkeys can be reconfigured (vs Ableton Live) so the send knobs also can be hidden(u can assign a comfortable toggling shortkey to them)

[sugo]

It`s curious!
I`ve never really worked with Live,
but generally with all daws i`ve used, i was able to bring songs to the end.
With Bitwig i started a lot of songs, but finished not one!

I really love the workflow, the look, the capabilities, but for me it works only as an inspiring idea-giver.

For me that was not enough for now, so i`ve sold it. And stay with Reaper, Sonar and Flstudio.

[Daags]

Ableton at 76% zoom looks poopalicious.

uh... I know appreciation of looks are subjective. but can you please tell me why it looks 'poopalicious' ?
i would assume the quality of how a graphical representation looks, in terms of size, would boil down to aliasing artificats etc. and there are absolutely none to speak of in most of the scaled down ableton options. like i said in my previous post, there are sweet and ugly spots but they are not size dependant.

so what you're saying is, by virtue of it displaying more - it is uglier ? please explain.


anyways, I've posted my own screen shots showing exactly the difference. 1366 x 768, mid spec laptop resolution limitation.

as you may or may not notice...my bitwig won't allow me to activate both the crossfade AND the track input/output info. Presumably because that would mean I'd only see about 1.5 scenes at a time. also note in Ableton just how much info i've got on each track...if i would hide the input/output info i'd gain another 4 or 5 scenes bringing me to 17 or 18 in total... if i would hide the same thing in bitwig (but show the crossfade, as it is in ableton) i'd gain nothing, and still be at a ludicrous 3 in comparison. fail.

as far as people talking about pop-up browsers, and things you can hide... please spare me. I wasn't born yesterday, of course I know I could hide the device lane to show more scenes - what do you take me for ?
however, this is what my typical session has to look like - this is what has to be displayed at any given time so i can see what's going on in my session without constantly mousing around just to get a glimpse of what's happening where.

so check out the differences:





lame-a-licious.

[Robmobius]

Dunno both are good... But I switched from Bitwig to Ableton. I just preferred the work flow of Ableton.

[xbitz]

but Bitwig can display the devices, and the affected macros (which is possible only with options.txt hack in Ableton and can't update itself automatically )



so displaying the devices is optionally in Bitiwg, groups can contains both layers and other groups(groups are projects with own fx tracks in Bitwig) which is also missing from AL

but yepp, AL has better session view, but Bitwig has far better arrangement one