The All In One Source Bitwig Information & Speculation Thread

[pc999]

[Gosh]

correct me if i'm wrong but most of the tools everyone is drooling about are already there in live (at least in live 9 suite and the live plus max combo).

[Ogopogo]

^I believe you are right, mostly. It is good to know that we are not going to be missing these things in order to get the other Bitwig stuff, though.

[ThomasHelzle]

correct me if i'm wrong but most of the tools everyone is drooling about are already there in live (at least in live 9 suite and the live plus max combo).

Yeah and in some areas Live Suite is much deeper and more mature, absolutely.

But since Live 9 I find myself unhappy about the direction it's going and about some of the limitations.
I no longer enjoy the way how Ableton communicates.
For me, it reached a certain "age" where things are no longer fluid, fun and exciting but begin to drag along.
The downside of maturity.

For me the differences to Live are what make me interested in Bitwig most.
I have Live Suite 8 and M4L but don't intend to update any more.

First: I personally enjoy startups and new beginnings.

Second: I deal with heavy duty software for the last 20 years in my main job (3D graphics) and I learned to hate large parts of what computers do, how big companies act and how old heaps of code tend to stagnate.

Unlike others, I don't have a set number of goals or features that I need to produce but I let myself be inspired by what I find in a tool - or many of them. So my main measure is if I get inspired or not - and Bitwig does that for me.
It's a mixture of on one hand a good set of tools, a certain openness for unusual usage, a certain cleverness in how things are solved/laid out, good solid sound, good solid performance, a good GUI and a friendly energetic human team - with some humour thrown in.

I like it that I download 116 MB (windows that is, mac and linux are 88 MB ATM) and not 1.7 GB.
I like it that there is a content downloader inside the software that lets me select what I want to install - or uninstall.
I like it that there is a Linux Version - I'm about to install Ubuntu to give that a try.

So for me personally it's not about if it has every feature under the sun or 512 Bit internal resolution.
While yes, it must be solid so one can work without being limited by technical stuff and the results must simply be up to the year 2013, but otherwise, I personally am more concerned if a tool makes me, well, happy

Again, YMMV

Cheers,

Tom

[The Mantra]

Unlike others, I don't have a set number of goals or features that I need to produce but I let myself be inspired by what I find in a tool
Cheers,

Tom

I agree, It took me some time to figure this out. I was initially a Cubase user, and was reluctant to move to live because there are many technical things that Cubase can do that live lacks. Cubase does just about every thing But I kept finding that the music I made in Live just was more creative and I had more fun using Live. When I finally embraced that realization and moved completely over to live, the quality of my music improved.

Some people will make more compelling art with finger paint even though Photoshop does every thing.

[Ogopogo]

beep boop beep

[ThomasHelzle]

Fun: I installed Ubuntu 12.04, installed Bitwig without a hitch, even figured out how to use my internal on-board sound with it since I was never able to get my Presonus Firebox to do anything under the Linux Distros I tried so far. Opened it, downloaded the content and was ready to play.
With 96000khz it was very unstable soundwise, but I'm sure this is related to the (alsa) use of my on board sound. With 44.1 though it ran fabulous. DSP use was very low even when I went wild on one track and put tons of effects on it to try them out.

I really like the factory effects BTW - the more I use them the better I like them.
From the nice Rotary to the Chorus, the Distortion, the great Ladder Filter Effect to the Transient Tool and the Compressor to the more involved Dynamics, the unique Blur, the Resonator Bank, the very interesting Reverb to name just some...
Everything sounds good or superb, often interesting, fresh.
This can easily stand on it's own.

As can the Polysynth that I'm trying out a bit more recently.
You can go a long way even with just the factory tools.

Then back to windows and opening the test file I did on Linux - also without a problem.

And I don't have any deep knowledge of Linux, so this is really encouraging.

Ubuntu is a bit on the candy factory side, I think I would prefer one of the Linux Mint flavours with a more oldschool desktop, but maybe that works too, I just wanted to give the officially supported version a go first.

I plan to have a side by side install of Windows and Linux in the future, since I'm a bit wary about the direction Windows is taking recently, so in the long run Linux may become a viable option even for music...

Interesting times

Cheers,

Tom

[pc999]

Fun: I installed Ubuntu 12.04, installed Bitwig without a hitch, even figured out how to use my internal on-board sound with it since I was never able to get my Presonus Firebox to do anything under the Linux Distros I tried so far. Opened it, downloaded the content and was ready to play.
With 96000khz it was very unstable soundwise, but I'm sure this is related to the (alsa) use of my on board sound. With 44.1 though it ran fabulous. DSP use was very low even when I went wild on one track and put tons of effects on it to try them out.

As a linux user many, many thanks,

If I may ask, is the cpu or latency lower under Linux ?(usually it is quite a lot from my experience in things like renoise or even T4 with latency bellow 4ms with the onboard sound card ALSA and no real time kernel, or using 50% cpu in W7 and 25% in ubuntu)

Very nice overall, and since in v2 you can create (sell/buy) BWS instruments/fx you probably will only need linux and BWS for anything audio related .




BTW you may want to try Ubuntu studio

http://ubuntustudio.org/

Basically a lot of what is nice in Linux for multimedia production and using xfce to make it even faster and easier multi tasking, it even brings a real-time kernel .

Also you can instal any desktops manager in any distro you like plenty to choose (Unity, Cinnamon, Mate, xfce, lxdc, gnome3, KDE and much more more).





PS: IIRC Presonus cards aren't supported at the moment, you can confirm it on the ALSA site

[pdxindy]

Thanks for all the info Thomas!

[pc999]

BTW here is the supported soundcards.

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Main

[ThomasHelzle]

Thanks for the info pc999 - highly appreciated!

My first install yesterday was on a virtual drive inside of a windows file system just to check it out.

Now I bought an additional SSD just for Ubuntu Studio and will try out how that goes.

Today I also found this: http://www.ffado.org/
They offer Firewire for quite a collection of interfaces and the Firebox is supposed to work with it - would be great. While there are much better interfaces, the Firebox does what I need quite well so I don't really want to buy a new interface just for Linux.

Yesterday I didn't have Jack as an option in BW, but if I remember correctly I have to start Jack explicitly, so that may have been the reason - the BW FAQ explicitly mentions and recommends Jack.

I didn't investigate latency etc. so far - I first have to brush up on my linux know-how...

I'll keep you updated on my progress

Cheers,

Tom

[fedexnman]

Firewire is a pain to setup with Qjackctrl ( Jack ) and Ubuntu , just saying . You have to get the low latency kernel and download the rt - irq threading and various other steps . Have fun . Ill be interested in trying BWS once its released on Linux though.

[ThomasHelzle]

Tell me about it...

So far no luck.
Jack is actually seeing everything my Firebox has to offer, all audio channels appear with the right names, even the midi channels, but although it says everything is fine and the server is running without errors and RT is lighting up, no application I tried was able to connect to those channels...

I read docs, I searched online, I watched YouTube Videos with smug people who rave about how there are so many settings for audio on Linux...

In the end I deleted the installation and started over, since I was unsure if those helpful people didn't do more harm than good with me having no way of knowing what all those kilometres of commandlinecode actually do exactly.

This was interleaved with Linux somehow messing with my bios so I couldn't start Windows anymore and the installer for the recommended Nvidia Drivers killing the X-System altogether so that I had to find out how to uninstall and purge them from the commandline.

So nothing new there. Linux, after all those years (I ran my first Linux server something like 15+ years ago), is the same horrible mess that it always was, but this time I hope to be able to over time at least get a basic system running, even if it only works with the onboard sound.
But this can't be the future.
No way in hell.

Why oh why did BeOS fail back in the day

Well, can't be helped

Cheers,

Tom

[pc999]

Tell me about it...

So far no luck.

...

Tom

Actually I think you just had bad luck with the Firebox being poorly supported on Linux. Then "you" messed things up on the terminal (:lol: I did it quite a few times trying stuff, today I just avoid doing it). AFAIK the usb interfaces that are listed on that link run great.


Anyway I actually dont use Jack as ALSA give me great results on lower latencies than I have in ASIO, just try it out the box before go deep in it, on the onboard sound at least it should be quite nice I think.






BTW if you have a newer motherboard, a UEFI one, that things brings the "Secure Boot feature" that MS demands for W8 you may need to run this to have access to windows https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
It is one of those things that MS likes making "you more secure" by having fewer choices

[ThomasHelzle]

Actually I think you just had bad luck with the Firebox being poorly supported on Linux.

BTW if you have a newer motherboard, a UEFI one, that things brings the "Secure Boot feature" that MS demands for W8 you may need to run this to have access to windows

I had too many such experiences in the past to think that it's just bad luck, but it doesn't really matter anyway.
I'll try some more and if I fail some more I'll just forget about it.
Been there, done that.

As for the BIOS - it was the other way around: Linux changed the boot order (which I have never seen before happen) and I couldn't access the BIOS since on reboot I was at the Grub-Prompt within a second without seeing the usual BIOS screen.
This totally baffled me, since I didn't know that something like that is even possible.
Took me a while to sort out.

Cheers,

Tom