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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

I bought a MIDI controller a few weeks ago and it came with a Bitwig license. I told one of my friends (musician, uses Ableton) and he told me that I should learn Ableton and forget about Bitwig. When I asked why he said that Bitwig is very new and it can disappear overnight just like many others before it. He said that the staying power of DAW software is very low. What's your take on this? I really liked Bitwig (much more than Ableton), but I don't want to invest my time into something that's not gonna be around.

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It's been around for over a decade at this point, so I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Ableton Live at this point. Bitwig was made by ex-Ableton engineers and outside of some of the more niche features, they're similar enough that anything you learn about Bitwig is transferable to using Ableton Live. Much more so than trying to move to one of them from Reaper, for instance. If you depend mostly on 3rd party plugins and less on what's built into the DAW, then they're effectively the same outside of simple navigation quirks unique to each.

I have active licenses for both and have used both for personal projects. I find Ableton to be slightly faster to navigate, probably because I've been using it for longer. If manufacturers of high quality multichannel interfaces had better Linux support, I'd migrate fully to Bitwig.

I just started learning so I have no preference...I might move to Linux though

I don't think you'll find a professional studio anywhere that doesn't have at least one Ableton live station. If you're into electronic music you'll be hard not to spot live being the driver for a lot of (non-dj) performances. I don't really think you can go wrong with it. But either way, switching isn't too much of a problem.

I'm with Ableton because I love the push hardware and ui, but everyone's different.

Are you saying that Ableton is better for live performances?

I've never used bitwig so I wouldn't be qualified to say. The killer features of Ableton are it's usage in live performances though, which is why it's called Ableton Live.

It's up to major version 6 (almost) and has been around for 11 years. At what point will your friend be satisfied?

DAWs are sort of all the same, your friend just wants to be able to share project files. The project file formats are the annoying part. Operating the DAW is usually sort of similar across different programs nowadays. Slightly different key binds.

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