Bitwig Studio 3: Enter The Grid. | Hacker News Reader

Bitwig Studio 3: Enter The Grid.

bitwig.com

60 pointsantfarm26 comments

It amazes me how fast this product is developing compared to all the competition.

Their architecture must be far more flexible than Ableton, who's 9 -> 10 upgrade was seriously underwhelming for the five years they had to work on it. Nested groups, multi-track editing, and capture are all welcome, so I'm not discounting what they DID add, but for the life of me I can't understand why here is still: No MPE, no VST3, no inline VST MIDI effects (you still have to use multi-track hacks), no comping, no global time signature changes, and the same stunted MIDI/Audio routing system.

The Grid has Max4Live directly in its crosshairs. It is obviously not a direct replacement — yet, but it covers 90% of the way most people use Max, without the need to dive into the guts of Max signal processing, and with far superior DAW integration.

My prediction is that this is a prelude to Bitwig releasing a module designer app, with full access to the DSP components that underly the existing built-in synths and modulation system, that will bring this thing home.

I don’t remember where I saw it, so it could be apocryphal, but I saw an admission from an Ableton developer that the difficulty in implementing MPE support is down to the fact that MIDI implementation details are baked into a bunch of disparate components across levels of abstraction within Live, which seems pretty plausible to me. I don’t envy the effort involved in rectifying that, but it does have me looking at Bitwig more and more.

Oh I have no doubt that's the case. Ableton, remember, began its life as a clip launcher. I have no doubt that its architecture has been built up over so many generations that moving forward in any significant way would require a massive compatibility-breaking re-write. That's why all the changes for the last few versions have been mostly extra effects/instruments and workflow improvements. It also explains why the new Max integration does little more than improve its launch time.

Bitwig has had the advantage of a greenfield redesign based on lessons learned by former Ableton devs. Their choice to implement the audio engine in portable C with proper process isolation and a Java UI is a brilliant move. It is so refreshing to have Bitwig's audio engine crash, and be able to choose to start it again or save my project without losing a thing.

I have to disagree with this idea of fast pace. Considering they have had to perform two full audio engine rewrites since they launched 1.0, and didn’t even have MIDI channels (while claiming to be next level MPE... no hardware works in MPE mode without those channels!). They switched to a yearly subscription to allow “more updates more quickly” but then drop to one major release per year.

Sure, they are doing a pretty impressive job. But I think they are lacking in the foresight department, otherwise they wouldn’t have needed to rewrite everything a couple times already since launch.

Pretty interesting addition. Reminds me of AudioMulch which basically only does this and is pretty fun sound creation tool too.

http://www.audiomulch.com

More things to try if you are interested in connecting modular bits for sound generation:

VCV Rack - https://vcvrack.com/

Jeskola Buzz - http://jeskola.net/buzz/

Reaktor 6 - https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...

Buzz takes me back. I spent so many hours with that in high school making acid house and annoying gabber.

I think is the only major DAW that works on linux.

There's also Ardour, which I use after starting in Ableton and going through Bitwig. I love Bitwig and its modular approach, but I really wanted to make music with open source software.

Tracktion/Waveform also has a Linux version, and they've made the older Tracktion 7 available free (including Elastique stretch) [1]. I gather Tracktion was developed by Julian Storer (of JUCE & ROLI fame), then purchased by Mackie, now spun off as its own company with Storer again.

Renoise also works on Linux, but probably doesn't count as a major DAW since it's a tracker interface (even though it supports VSTs, VSTi's etc). [2]

[1] https://www.tracktion.com/products/t7-daw

[2] https://www.renoise.com/

It's not fully supported, but there are also experimental builds for reaper:

https://www.reaper.fm/download.php#linux_download

I love supporting this company for this exact reason. There are other DAWs, and some are free, but I am all for quality pro audio on linux.

My favourite DAW. Think I am going to have to invest in a new DC coupled interface with lots of inputs and outputs now to drive the modular.

You're likely aware of this already, but the expert sleepers ES-8 is a great way to interface the two worlds.

I don't know anything about modular, do you use this to route audio through modules?

What's a typical use case for this? Custom audio effects, or is it mostly just to get audio back into the DAW from your modular?

You can route audio into/out of a modular synth with this but the main selling point is being able to send CV or control voltage signals from your DAW to your modular. CV is just DC electrical signal that represents some value you want to manipulate. Think of 0v representing the lowest note/frequency on the keyboard and 5v representing the highest, with all voltages in between representing intermediate values, or 0 representing a filter being set to the lowest frequency and 5 representing completely open, letting all sound through. Boutique analog equipment that can manipulate/sequence CV is usually pretty expensive, but with a module like this you can get similar/more functionality for less.

As twalla mentions, while it's useful for audio, it's especially good for control voltages, which most audio interfaces will filter out. As Bitwig has devices for sending control voltages, it allows you to control modules from the software.

I use a Lynx Aurora with CV from Bitwig, and it works wonderfully.

Bells and whistles and no improvements to workflow. Sad to see because this DAW is really promising. At the moment they are still far behind Ableton and Ableton itself is lacking in the workflow department. The market is so underserved that those companies can throw anything and people will buy, sadly they forgot about professionals again.

Site is hard to reach, but here's the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wHHbV8Zw4g

I've been a steady user since version 1, and I've really enjoyed seeing this DAW progress.

The modulators and easy workflow/resampling (bouncing tracks) is very intuitive and efficient. The addition of this is going to really make it the ultimate sound design playground.

Looking forward to what this team continues to bring!

I'm working on a new DAW of sorts. Check it out if you are interested, I'm hoping to make your workflow really fast

http://ngrid.io

The site is down for me. But amazing project and team!

It's back now. Definitely worth a look. Been using bitwig for ages as it works beautifully on Linux and I'm really excited about version 3. Nice to see the project progress in such an amazing way.

I really do wonder why so few places use CDNs these days.

Otherwise, I love what this software is aiming for.

Looks like it is down. HN hug of death ?

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