Bitwig, started by former developers of Ableton, supports Ableton Push and many other MIDI controllers[1], and is probably the most advanced DAW for electronic music production currently available.
It's not as popular as Ableton, because it's much newer and most people rarely switch DAWs they are used to.
> Other than that Reaper needs a mention, it is the best DAW[1] in terms of functionality and power.
That's true, Reaper might be the best DAW for any non-electronic music oriented workflows. But this separation is essential: they were designed with different primary use cases in mind.
I wish Reaper supported Linux natively (without Wine).
It is supported as far as the Bitwig scripting API can support it. The experience is not the same as using Push natively with Ableton.
I have a Push 2 with Ableton.
Could not agree more. I'm a voice actor, and Reaper is my secret weapon for speed and efficiency in non-music-based audio production. I love it.
I was also blown away by their pricing - you can pay as little as $1 for the full version, which is what I did, but after seeing how well it works, I did a donation to match the recommended price of $45.
It's also possible to, for example, 'apt-get install ardour' and get a similar version in Debian Buster. I presume there are lots of other operating systems that this is built for, so Ardour does make a significant contribution to free software.
Just asking out of curiosity. Thanks
They are suitable for hobbyists to professional level.
I personally am a hobbyist musician and programmer by profession. I'd imagine many others here are like me as well.
I'm a beginner, so don't know much about Ableton or Bitwig.
When Bitwig was on sale, I got it (and as a nice surprise found that my Bitwig 2 license also included Bitwig 3 now)
How many bitwig users here use it in a live performance context?
I probably use 10% of bigwig and 2% of Ableton. So the important factor is whether something is missing in Bitwig, and how polished/intuitive the bits I do use are.
Also they should call it Bigwig since everyone’s autocomplete seems to insist on it.
Bitwig works on a subscription program for updates. You want the latest you buy a subscription and it lasts for a year. After the subscription is over you get to use whatever version you are on for life, but no updates.
1. What would one miss if using Bitwig over others, if anything?
2. Same question as the above for Reaper?
3. How would the two compare with each other.
Note: I have already noted the comments child to yours.
Thanks.
EDIT: sorry, my question was about whether Linux supports VST. I would assume that Bitwig did at v0.1 :-)
Bitwig is quite similar to Ableton in terms of capabilities, I never tried this myself, but there seems to be a way (assuming you want Windows VSTs on Linux) https://answers.bitwig.com/questions/624/vst-windows-on-linu...
I am perfectly happy with the built-in stuff however. Because of bitwigs extremely strong modulation engine the standard effects are probably the most powerful and expressive ones out there.
You can absolutely make VSTs for Linux, but I imagine that very few people do.
The software itself works well, it's really great, but with VSTs it's quite tricky. I got a couple to work that explicitly support linux, but for example Serum I couldn't get to work properly.
Recently I decided that it's not work all the hassle, and setup a windows computer again. I want as little friction as possible, because the process of making electronic music is already hard enough by itself.
I found it a pain to set up in the first place, and it's hit-and-miss which plugins work in it, but once up and running it actually works smoothly enough, in my experience. (Larger, more complicated VSTs seem correspondingly less likely to work. Of ones that don't immediately work, some can be massaged into working with some tweaking of your wine setup. There's a webpage somewhere with a list of what plugins are known to work and what you need to do to get them to work.)
There are other ways of running windows-based VSTs, but that's the one I'm familiar with.
Cubase Artist: ~ $340
Reaper: Free/$60/$225
Pro tools: ~ $600
It's priced in the same league as its competitors.
Arturia midi controllers (eg Minilab mkII: ~$100) come bundled with a license for Ableton Live Lite which is pretty functional and might satisfy hobbyist needs.
NI Komplete 12 Full - $1600
(obviously, this analogy breaks under pressure; software still lacks the concrete permanence of a physical instrument)