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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.

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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.

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