Bitwig is my favorite software - it really is all in one music production software, and they have great support for Linux. I have used it hooked up to a room full of synths, but these days (due to space constraints) I make music with just the software (with occasionally a midi keyboard). No need for any VSTs (unless you really want to) - the built in synths and effects plugins are high quality.
(I started out using trackers in the 90s - Fast, Impulse, and eventually Buzz. I held off using DAWs for a long time because I didn't like the lack of information density that trackers are good at, but turns out I really don't miss that in Bitwig.)
Highly recommend the Dirtyave M8 [1] for a tracker fix that comes in hardware firm and is a gift that keeps in giving with increasingly good firmware updates.
I really wish there was something between Furnace and OpenMPT - where you could mix hardware-reproducible chiptune sequencing seamlessly with more modern soft synth and samplers. Renose is plenty capable, but it’s felt awkward to fiddle with when I’ve tried it - I really just need to sit down and devote a period of extended experimentation to it.
Some background on Buzz for others: Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
I believe the event you describe is pretty ancient, and Buzz recovered and continued development for many years after. I wrote some plugins for the more recent versions of Buzz, the plugin API was always nice to work with (compared to VST at least!)
Sounds like a tragic case of not making backups, to me. Even if the author used a VCS, when the drive died it would have taken the repo with it all the same.
Actually from 2008 to 2016 there was updates, they sent off the disk to a recovery firm and got a mostly latest copy and built from that. The newer versions used .NET and the main improvment in those builds was a new pattern-system (XP-patterns) so you could make patterns that selected parameters from one or more machines.
So the annoyance of having to work in different patterns when your "instrument" was made out of a chain of discrete modules went away (also useful for making chords from primitive machines since you could hook multiple generators in one pattern).
> Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
Yeah, lemme go ahead and commit this code I've been working on for weeks without creating a repo...
Buzz was so great. I came across it when I learned James Holden produced his early stuff on it and was hooked. It had a good community with hundreds of synths and effects you could download from Buzzmachines. It was such a shame they lost the source code, I’d have loved to see how it developed.
This made me google Buzz and it turns out it was recoded by the author and there was an update in 2022. Not sure if it’s still developed. I’m not on a Windows machine so won’t be able to try it easily unfortunately, wish it was open source so it could be ported to Mac
Reaper is the closest thing to a "programmer's DAW". Highly configurable and scriptable, it's kind of a DAW toolkit that comes with a great free default. It also has the fairest pricing and upgrade policy I've ever seen in a software product.
I find it really frustrating that the Ableton format is closed, so you can't write software to generate projects for Ableton Push.
Want I want is the fastest path to making beats using physical interaction with MIDI hardware based upon loops and one-shots I have, without endless coding or fiddling. Open to purchasing new hardware.
Very simple, there's basically a scripting API that lets you touch most of what's going on in the editor or hardware interfacing with the hardware. It has official bindings for Lua and python as well as reaper's own language.
That said I find myself more often leaning just to standalone scripts for that kind of thing and using the jack server on Linux to put them in between my hardware and reaper. That way it's quite portable if I want to switch out reaper and do something directly with a standalone synth for example and have things still work a little bit.
I hear it a lot that people feel stuck on Mac or Windows for various software but for me the jack audio server keeps me tied to Linux!
> Do you mind sending me an email (in profile) if I have a few questions?
Why don't you ask here so we can all benefit (maybe) from the answers? :) Besides, might be more people who can answer too, and no added pressure on parent!
Sure, I can describe some of the basics I'm trying to do.
My goal is to autogenerate "projects" with loops and one hits, so I have like 100 candidate "songs" or "kits" to work with just using hardware and avoiding a DAW. And then to quickly jam on each song/kit to create an arrangement in hardware that I can save. Ending up with 20 scratch arrangements that I can load into a DAW and then produce / etc more carefully.
I want to load a "kit" into the MIDI controller and trigger sounds by hitting buttons. That part seems clear to me with JACK. That I can basically drop straight into hardware and start working with my audio material.
Now where I feel stuck is I'd like my knobs to do basic filtering, I'd like the loops to loop when I trigger them, and I'd like to be able to save my jammed arrangement to load into a DAW later.
Saving it seems like I could just save MIDI.
For filters, I am not sure which library I would use, and here is where it seems like I should be controlling a real DAW (so I get the same filter during my jam as in postproduction).
For triggering a loop that goes and loops, I have to write that by hand?
Apologies if what it sounds like what I want is: "I can use software to create 100 candidate Ableton projects with the clips pre-mapped and do a looped arrangement very quickly."
Specifically in terms of scripts that sit between the hardware and Reaper?
Honestly it's very scripty stuff that's mostly one-time use. Stuff like sending the notes I play to a different midi channel depending on their velocity, or sending specific notes to a particular synth while all the others go to another.
It's kind of like "what sort of shell scripting du you do?" you know? It's just whatever I need to do given the situation.
One particular bit of fun I had was "flipping the polarity" of my keyboard, so that the left hand was playing high notes and the right hand the low notes. I got my Joe Zawinul on Black Market vibe going!
I can email you in a while but feel free to ask anything here also.
> I find it really frustrating that the Ableton format is closed
Last time I checked, they're just plaintext XML, so while the format is proprietary, it's trivial to "reverse engineer", if you can even call it that.
> Want I want is the fastest path to making beats using physical interaction with MIDI hardware based upon loops and one-shots I have, without endless coding or fiddling. Open to purchasing new hardware.
If you're already using Ableton, this should be easy as long as your computer/audio interface has a midi out port, you basically just select what midi channel a Ableton midi track should use, and start sending stuff, no coding or fiddling required :)
I'm aware that the format is undocumented XML, thank you for sharing anyway.
I've found it painful enough to reverse engineer that it sucks the joy out of any Ableton programming.
I honestly believe this is one of the most end-user unfriendly decisions in the digital music world.
> If you're already using Ableton, this should be easy as long as your computer/audio interface has a midi out port, you basically just select what midi channel a Ableton midi track should use, and start sending stuff, no coding or fiddling required :)
That requires clicking around in Ableton though, right? My goal is to generate like 100 different projects and jam on the effortlessly.
>I've found it painful enough to reverse engineer that it sucks the joy out of any Ableton programming. I honestly believe this is one of the most end-user unfriendly decisions in the digital music world.
It's supposed to be a DAW to sequence, record, and play live in.
Not a target for programmatically generating songs.
>That requires clicking around in Ableton though, right? My goal is to generate like 100 different projects and jam on the effortlessly.
> I honestly believe this is one of the most end-user unfriendly decisions in the digital music world.
Eeeh, you're brushing past A LOT of decisions across the years, many much more unfriendly than "Lets dump undocumented but plain-text XML into a file and change the file-extension". At least some engineer as Ableton thought enough of us to let it be plain-text, that's pretty friendly compared to all the horribleness out there.
> That requires clicking around in Ableton though, right? My goal is to generate like 100 different projects and jam on the effortlessly.
Yeah, if you just wanna send midi out to one channel, I think you'd be able to do it with 2 or 3 clicks or something like that, unless you setup a template and you'll only have to do that once.
Do you really have that many unique midi setups you switch frequently between? I have one "template" per setup, that I made once, that is used for a starting point for every project, where each one has a slightly different midi/audio in/out setup. But when I wanna jam, I essentially open up the template, then save-as, and it's ready for midi in/out and audio in/out, maybe something like that could work for you?
Basically, instead of trying to aim to generate all combinations up-front, have one template as a starting point, go from there when needed.
Have you reversed engineered the Ableton project format?
I got frustrated the last time I tried, and currently LLMs tell me "Live updates break things constantly". Are my fears oversold? At the time I was doing it, I was trying to control all the parameters of Ableton native synths which was a headache.
Now what I want to do is mainly create different kits of loops + one hits using ML, at the bare minimum.
I have a background in audio ML so I imagine there would be other sorts of thing I might want to do later. But currently it's just one "template" with different filler sounds.
There isn't much more to it :) It wouldn't say it's the best structure/design, but it's all there in plain-text basically, so pretty easy to just read through it or search.
> currently LLMs tell me "Live updates break things constantly". Are my fears oversold?
Just stick with the same Ableton version for the duration of your work on those tracks, it's basically what you wanna do regardless of how complicated your project/setup is, as things do change between versions. But FWIW, none of the projects I've manually edited have broken, at least when I last moved from 11 to 12.
> I was trying to control all the parameters of Ableton native synths which was a headache.
For that you'd go for MIDI, but if you truly need 100 project files to run one by one, then generating those XMLs with whatever, changing the file-name and opening up in Ableton with the midi afterwards feels like it shouldn't be too hard.
Maybe it's because I'm a "Compose libraries over live inside frameworks" kind of guy, but I always felt like modular synths are more like the "Programmer's DAW" then the DAW suites, DAWs feel more like what Dreamweaver used to be for developers :)
I own a pretty fun analog semimodular (Behringer Neutron), but the Bitwig plugin supports 16+ voice polyphony which is pretty unique outside VSTs and $10,000+ analog synths
Modular synths feel more like "sysadmin's DAW" — the one where you are trying to live modify production server from root shell and any mistake will blow it out. And there is no save and no undo.
Digital audio workstation. It's used for putting together music tracks, but... the scope of that is huge. It's probably best to find some demo/tutorial on YouTube to understand it. Even the ultra compressed bitwig6 announcement should give you an idea https://youtu.be/xJF7i3x46Ec
Digital Audio Workstation, basically all those programs with multiple tracks per music channel, tons of effects and plugins, with MIDI input to be controlled by any kind of musical devices, even macros can be assigned to specific chords or melody snippets.
Digital Audio Workstation, which is a fancy name for a kind of app where you can make a song on your computer. Whether that's a recording of an instrument or voice, or a digital instrument playing from MIDI signal (piano, synth, anything), or recorded samples from various sources, you can put all that together however you want, including all sorts of effects (lotta plugins).
Hey guys, I like making music using Bitwig and Logic. I used to do this for a year when I was 16. Now I’m more than twice as old and picked up the hobby again.
Does anyone want to connect and hangout (maybe even making some music together?). I also have a decent to good beatbox, some rapping skills (mostly Dutch but English too) and some indie singing skills. I started making EDM and lofi at the moment.
Maybe we could make a small group even and see what happens, no expectations.
Bitwig was the next big DAW with a lot of YouTubers making content some 3 years (?) ago, then the content suddenly stopped. It was some move the company made which upset the community IIRC. Bitwigs YouTube presence never recovered. Anyone with insights on what happened and how it has turned out eventually?
They made a bunch of extra-special devices called the "spectral suite" that they were gonna paywall beyond the normal upgrade plan. There was the big backlash and they fully backed down pretty quickly and that was that.
I'm not sure why the content stopped, but it might be that it was sponsored content and a bunch of sponsor-creator relationships got soured
After using Ableton for years and previously Logic, I've never used music software that evolves as fast as Bitwig. The rate at which they improve it is pretty mind-blowing in comparison.
When the founders are also the lead engineers, incentives are aligned. I asked the Ableton CEO at multiple events and expos to fix repeatable bugs, and add proper PDC, and he mocked me.
Yeah, I think four of the founders/initial employees were ex-Ableton people, it was a thing that was highlighted when Bitwig first launched (around 2014 maybe?), together with that they were also Berlin-based (because that matters...) and it had Linux support from day one :)
I'm not finding any first-hand sources about it, but remember that most articles at the time mentioned it one way or another.
On the other hand I once opened a ticket for Ableton Live 9 asking to fix an extremely annoying windows-only race condition when using midi at the same time from a Komplete Kontrol Instance and a regular track session session using an M-series Native Instruments keyboard, and they fixed it after a few weeks.
I did the same with Bitwig in 2022 and the bug it's still there.
He mocked you? Well, I am sure we would like to know more. In another comment someone said "at least developers have thought of others" because they dump their stuff in plaintext, but then you come out with such a story which makes me want to stay away from anything related to Ableton.
>but then you come out with such a story which makes me want to stay away from anything related to Ableton.
Knee-jerk responding like that to a random anecdotes by a random person on the internet, who might as well be total bullshit, is not exactly the most prudent software evaluation path.
Perhaps the "mocking" was just the CEO not placing the importance that the person thinks their request should. Or the CEO responded to rude incessant tone. Or the CEO had a bad day, and the parent was like the 10th person nagging their balls with their pet peeves at that show.
The amount of information to that comment is almost zero, and we don't know tons of context.
Oh geez, wonder what was wrong out of these 3 sentences.
1st: Bad?
2nd: Bad?
3rd: Bad?
Please bots, help me clear this up. :)
Down-vote afterwards, or I am sorry, is the down-vote for the 2nd? Cry me a river, then, for not liking Ableton. sighs. I prefer FL Studio.
I swear these down-votes are utterly useless. I will apply the previously mentioned uBlock rules so I will not see these pointless (!) down-votes.
God forbid I do not like the software you like. God forbid I am aware enough to realize it might be a bias. God forbid I ask for elaboration. God forbid I voice any of this.
Admission of "confirmation bias" doesn't make the comments about the software more valuable, it makes them less. Probably that's what drove the downvotes.
> doesn't make the comments about the software more valuable
I admitted to having confirmation bias, which influence my decisions. I think it is valuable to recognize and to admit to one's biases, regardless of the subject matter.
I never liked Ableton, and I still do not know if I should believe the guy, I would really like some details.
Seconded, I think even one such a story on HN for this specific topic, where big tech incentives aren’t that high, is a high quality signal of company rot.
sure, base your software decisions on random anecdotes on HN, from people who might had been rude themselves, misreading the response they got, or worse...
Not sure. 6 looks nice, but the past 3-4 versions just had this modularity improvements, which I don't particularly care for, and much smaller workflow, sequencing, audio editing, fx and audio vst improvements (which I do care for)
> I've never used music software that evolves as fast as Bitwig
I've been curious about Bitwig, played around with it a bit, but never made the switch from Ableton. After reading this, which I think was intended as a positive, I'm now less curious about Bitwig...
I get your meaning, but I associate changes to DAWs more positively than changes to other software. Ableton famously had a horrific bug with its plugin delay compensation for multiple versions. You deal with that long enough, you appreciate an attentive developer.
Also love FL Studio. They've made amazing changes over the years. Now they're... Experimenting more with AI. Not a big fan.
> Stem separation in Logic is an insanely useful feature.
For some, and for others not. DAWs are so huge, feature-packed and try to cater to so many use cases, that at one point you have to say no to something.
While stem separation is useful for many things, I've only "missed" it for DJ duties, and then I'm not using a DAW anyways but whatever DJ OS/software the controller needs/has, so I'd probably say I'm another user who don't care about my DAW having stem separation or not. I don't think I've felt like I needed that even once for production purposes.
Not OP, but my workflow for composition is to sing a new melody, flesh out an arrangement on my Montage, and bring it into my DAW for adding layers, effect chains, etc. I don't think I've ever used a reference track in the 20 odd years I've been making music.
Personally I'd prefer Bitwig focus on core DAW features rather than something like stem separation for which there are already many decent dedicated tools (demucs, spleeter, etc.)
I used reference tracks for mastering before, once or twice for mixing, but outside of that, not so much. And when I've used them, I haven't thought once I needed to separate out the instruments, but I guess that's because of what I used them for. Most of the production I do is outside of Ableton, so maybe I'm not considered a "serious" Ableton user :)
Strudel is fun. If you're interested in getting Strudel-like sequencing inside of a DAW, check out the latest version of Renoise, which added a Lua-based phrase scripting environment with support for Tidal Cycles notation. They also added it to their Redux plugin, so you can use it in literally any DAW.
Yes! Strudel and tidal cycles are amazing livecoding systems. I'd like to match the expressiveness of bitwig though so I'm working on a merge of glicol (web based livecoding with signal processing) and studel.
That's unfortunate. Live's ML-based sample tagging and similar sound search have been a huge help. I don't think I could give it up. I guess this wouldn't matter if you don't do much with samples but samples are a huge part of modern music production.
I've followed BitWig for a while now and it's increasingly clear with each release that they have a particular kind of music production in mind, and it's not for me. That's a good thing: being differentiated is how every other DAW has survived. I just had some hope it might permit a path to Linux for me and the way I make music some day.
The new timeline event editing functionality looks fluid, powerful and polished. I've never used Bitwig but have heavily used dozens of timeline-based media editing GUIs over the last three decades including leading video, audio, animation, 3D and music production tools. Just watching these brief demo videos, I'm seeing some very nice editing features as well as thoughtful interaction touches.
I appreciate the Bitwig team's choice to focus on perfecting timeline event editing workflow at a time when many media production tools are bolting on poorly thought through AI features of questionable value. In most advanced media creation workflows, some detailed event editing will always be necessary and, IMHO, it's still far from a "solved problem."
While some tools have put in the sustained effort over many years to become "pretty good", IMHO none are yet "great", and too many are still lagging with 2000s-era timeline event editing. Even today's best of breed tools can become at least tedious, if not frustrating, during an intense multi-hour session of complex detail work. Yet in recent years I'm not seeing much sustained focus or effort going toward improving timeline event editing in most mature tools. While "Timeline Event Editing" isn't nearly as sexy sounding as AI - for me AI features in media creation tooling have so far mostly focused on reducing the time I spend doing the parts of media creation I enjoy the most. Whereas the features Bitwig is showing here are focused on minimizing the time and effort I have to doing the parts I hate the most.
I don't know if you're in or around the musician or especially EDM producer community, or just the online artist community in general, but the general sentiment is that most if not all AI features are for people who aren't actually interested in making music, so maybe not actually all that useful.
Kinda? The biggest thing is that it's been done by so many other places already that it's sort of a waste of time to spend any time on it when there's already a number of other services. It doesn't really fit into the rest of the design and purpose of Bitwig, so it would really just be a gimmick, or at least seen as one by the core community.
Also, they're sort of an legal-ethics dilemma in that The only time you would really use stim separation is if you don't have the stems already, and therefore almost certainly don't have clearance and can't really use them for anything commercial. Probably not as big of a concern but definitely something to consider.
Really the big one is that a lot the creative online community and especially the kind of community around Bitwig has a pretty strong opinion against generative AI, which includes things like stem separation.
It wasn't advertised by the company. The post is a third party reporting news about Bitwig and inserted its own opinion.
I've never actually seen Bitwig the company refer to "AI" in any capacity, probably be cause it's not relevant to what they do or make, so no "virtue signalling".
I think it is, before it was built into Logic I had a little script setup that would use Meta Demucs. I would use it on my own tracks so I could remix (especially old ones which I had no stems for). It’s also great for sampling and experimentation
I'd expect most cases of stem separation to be handled well by applying specialized software to source music, exporting the stems as audio files, and importing them as individual tracks or samples in the DAW.
Are there workflows that benefit from integrating stem separation in a DAW?
It's like a lot of other feature; ease of use. Imagine your DAW only supports import of wav files, you could argue that there are already services / programs that convert * to .wav, so no need to implement that. But if it's build in not only is it one less program to install, it's also convenient.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I wasn't planning to renew so soon. Then they dropped this bombshell and I impulse bought another 12 months subscription. So far I'm digging it and looking forward to composing some spicey chord progressions.
Made the switch from Ableton to Bitwig a few years ago and never looked back so maybe out of date now:
- modulations everywhere that is actually easy to use and works
- easier modular synth environment than Max. Think easy like Nord modular but much, much better
- Linux support
- better UI overall
Don't know if it is still the case - but one of Bitwig's initial advantages over Ableton was that it did a better job of "siloing" your plugins, so if for some reason one of your VSTs crashed it didn't take the entire DAW down with it.
bitwig is the leader in probabilistic sequencing and automation. they entered the space with three big ideas: (1) you can modulate anything by anything else, (2) any modulation can have probability applied, and (3) automation can be applied to individual notes. these ideas were always around but relegated to more niche tools like reason and max. thanks to bitwig, the other daws have spent a lot of the last ten years applying these ideas as well, but bitwig still has the most complete solution. it's a great primary daw for outboard- and plugin-averse recording engineers and bedroom producers; it's the best _secondary_ daw if you use one of the majors for work and want something fresh for play, inspiration, or continuing education.
i use ableton. every time i get excited for an update, it's because i'm finally getting something bitwig users have had for years
