Is Bitwig stable / light on CPU enough? (For heavy projects)

[Zacchino]

I've seen Studio One 4.5 update boast a 50% increase in CPU efficiency for both Track count, native and 3rd Party Plugins.

I don't see alot of people online who actually finished albums / songs on Bitwig (is there?)....

Anyone had the chance to build a heavy track-count / multiple Kontakt libraries kind of project without any crash / cpu spike?

I'm wondering how reliable is Bitwig in a real-life, not toying around, pro situation?

(On any reasonable machine w/ 16/32Gb of Ram + i7 8th Gen CPU + SSD)

[antic604]

I've seen Studio One 4.5 update boast a 50% increase in CPU efficiency for both Track count, native and 3rd Party Plugins.

I don't see alot of people online who actually finished albums / songs on Bitwig (is there?)....

Anyone had the chance to build a heavy track-count / multiple Kontakt libraries kind of project without any crash / cpu spike?

I'm wondering how reliable is Bitwig in a real-life, not toying around, pro situation?

(On any reasonable machine w/ 16/32Gb of Ram + i7 8th Gen CPU + SSD)

1) DAW like S1 (or Cubase, Logic, Reaper) will always be able to run more VSTs and bigger sessions due to pre-buffering mechanisms, which basically means that everything that isn't record enabled is pre-rendered ahead of playback. Bitwig on the other hand assumes you'll change the arrangement on the fly (via clip launcher), that you'll swap presets or devices as it plays, that instruments and FX contain lots of (cross)modulations whether random and/or audio-rate, that your music can be self-generated and even play without transport moving, etc. They're a completely different approach to DAW and "heavy project" mean something else in them: for S1 it's typically a lot of audio tracks & simple FX (like eq, compressor), for Bitwig it's a low to medium track-count project with lots of MIDI, automation, modulation, cross-routing, complex parallel FX chains, etc.

2) On OSX there's documented issues with poor performance in bigger projects, mostly related to GUI. You should be fine on a PC or - even better - Linux, though.

3) Yeah, there's a lot of people releasing music in Bitwig. Two notable examples I'm aware of:
https://polarity.bandcamp.com/
https://mamomamrecords.bandcamp.com/album/voidgazing
https://mamomamrecords.bandcamp.com/alb ... in-24-bits

[Beerhunter]

as mentioned before, it depends on the stuff you do.

I manly record, edit and mix incl. drum-replacement, pitch correction etc.
There has been no issues running 30-60 tracks on 5-12ms latency, without dropouts or similar on an Xeon 1230v3 @3.3Ghz paired with 24GB of RAM and an SSD, running Ubuntu Linux with a pre-compiled low-latency Kernel.


greetings

[Yokai]

It’s absolutely possible to do big projects end-to-end in Bitwig. It has all the same general workflow features as Ableton (but MORE), and it’s much more efficient about resource-usage than Ableton. Anyone who produces in Ableton can move over to Bitwig and quickly be right at home and enjoying vastly more possibilities—especially now that the 3.0 beta is nearing its end.

Compared to DAWs other than Ableton? Antics explained all the high points there.

[bolba]

If these guys can finish album with Bitwig:
https://twitter.com/camokrooked
you also can

[zengel]

it’s much more efficient about resource-usage than Ableton.

really ? and how does it allows that ? really curious about that .

Anyone had the chance to build a heavy track-count / multiple Kontakt libraries kind of project without any crash / cpu spike?
(On any reasonable machine w/ 16/32Gb of Ram + i7 8th Gen CPU + SSD)

I own a machine similar to yours .
i own Bitwig and Ableton.

Ableton make a lot of work to stabilize their DAW and add stuff that Bitwig added ,like CV module or better touch screen friendly gesture.

Ableton become more stable but Bitwig still remain more stable. Due to the Bitwig sandboxing vst can't crash the whole thing . And that's a really big plus.
You can manage as many tracks as your pc can handle.
I imported project from live To Bitwig with same plugs tracks etc and Both are for me the same in term of cpu usage when working with a set . perhaps there are little differences i do not really know what part is due to "feeling" and what is really due to ressources management .
What i really like with bitwig in term of praticity compared to live. the start speed so fast compared to live. One day i worked on Bitwig and at a certain moment i said to myself "wow ! it does not crash".After spending so mutch time restarting live because of crashes , that was fantastic ! lol.In Bitwig, I love the way you can save presets rack and find what you need so fast compared to live.And the routing ! you do not need multiple tracks to work with drums chains(in my case) . The sends in groups ! in fact Bitwig is really good in a lot of thing that you need to know "the trick" in live.
In live, i still love the "gate" clips , grooves pool, some new native plugs (like echo !) , my push is still really better in live but a great work is made by moss to make it really good on Bitwig , and new features of live 10.1 ...plus clyphx and arsenal that extend so deeply the programming for gigs.
The fight is hard to choose between live and Bitwig. then i make some project in Bitwig and some in live.
Then yes ! Bitwig is great and live still stay a good DAW (even if it stays frustrating).

[Yokai]

@zengel

TL;DR is that when you freeze a track in Ableton, that frees up the CPU impact, but not the latency caused by devices on that track, nor the memory usage for devices on that track.

By contrast, when you bounce a track to audio in Bitwig—and then deactivate the original track—literally ALL CPU, Latency, and Memory impact is removed. But you still are able to re-activate that original track at any time, make tweaks, and re-bounce it, if you need to go back for some reason. Even better, Bitwig will automatically hide deactivated tracks, if you like, keeping your project view nice and clean.

So.... in general.... Bitwig manages the project latency much better, and manages the VST/device memory usage much better.

[zengel]

@zengel

TL;DR is that when you freeze a track in Ableton, that frees up the CPU impact, but not the latency caused by devices on that track, nor the memory usage for devices on that track.

By contrast, when you bounce a track to audio in Bitwig—and then deactivate the original track—literally ALL CPU, Latency, and Memory impact is removed. But you still are able to re-activate that original track at any time, make tweaks, and re-bounce it, if you need to go back for some reason. Even better, Bitwig will automatically hide deactivated tracks, if you like, keeping your project view nice and clean.

So.... in general.... Bitwig manages the project latency much better, and manages the VST/device memory usage much better.

I forgot that ! thanks for remembering me !

[wavedigit]

it’s much more efficient about resource-usage than Ableton.

really ? and how does it allows that ? really curious about that .

Generally, a new codebase from the ground-up has less technical debt and as such it can allow you to provide optimizations without many additional bugs.
Also, IIRC every device is JIT compiled to be optimized for your specific CPU upon loading, thus further increasing efficiency.

[ejgallego]

@Beerhunter would you mind sharing information about your audio interface, I'm looking to buy a new one that performs well on Linux. TIA!

[Hez]

I've had a few strange issues with projects not loading or not bouncing tracks over the last few years, but mainly in the period where I was making silly psytrance with like 200 tracks and lots and lots of 3rd party plugins on each one. Since they implemented the 'don't load plugins on deactivated tracks' it's become much easier to manage extremely large projects.

These days my songs usually have around 30-50 tracks, still pretty plugin heavy, and I haven't run into any issues for a while. Generally I think you want to get into a workflow where you are rendering 3rd party VSTs to audio as soon as you can - this is good practice, even if you have a super efficient DAW like Cubase that can handle more plugin instances than Bitwig because it doesn't support cross-channel audio rate modulation etc.

I think there are still some small issues with sporadic xruns in Bitwig (i.e. I sometimes get CPU crackles even when CPU usage is hovering around 40% of max load) but these rarely get in the way of me completing songs.

[Beerhunter]

I am using the Scarlett 18i20 first gen.

I assume that the second generation might work ven better.

If you have a greater budget, you might try RME interfaces or maybe something else.


Cheers

[Zacchino]

I'm sitting back reading all the replies.

It's so reassuring to know many of you really stressed-tested BW. Even more knowing how it isn't that bad and in some cases, better than the competition.

Like many I was shocked to find out they chose JAVA as a tech stack (why not JS with Node... Or React since we're in Network/Web-oriented stacks). I always felt FL Studio with its Delphi lang. and vector UI, or Live's C++ (and I guess Cocoa/Swift for Mac? Not sure) was the most robust stack for Audio. Happy to be proven wrong.

But still, compared to Live and FL (with its instant startup), Bitwig really takes its time to fire up. I know that's not an indication of stability, but yeah it's a luxury we'll probably be able to afford in v4/v5 and up.

My uneducated guess for this slow startup is it's mounting a virtual machine with JRE (or something) to launch the app within this virtual machine. And if it's the case, I understand it's great for multi-os compatibility but secretely my spoiled inner-child is thinking "yuk". I'm sure I'm completely wrong... Am I?

PS: I'm waiting for the one who'll correct me saying "Java is not a network/web stack you fool". I know, it's just my unlearned feel about it. When I hear "Java", immediately I'm thinking about Finance, Banking, SAP, people looking like stock photos in an office...

Gosh I'm such a turd sandwich for complaining like this for a software that's affordable and yet so powerful. What's wrong with me?! I blame the member berries (member the 80's Trackers? Oh yeah I member)

[dreamstate42]

If I remember correctly, Bitwig uses Java only for the UI (with a custom built JVM that, as you mentioned, gets fired up on startup), the core audio engine is written in C++ / Assembler (there was a Facebook post from one of the devs around somewhere, but I can't seem to find it right now). I never really "liked" Java myself (primarily because I had to code in it for a while), but to me Bitwig is the first example of an application that shows how efficient Java can be if you know what you're doing and how to optimise it.

[Hez]

But still, compared to Live and FL (with its instant startup), Bitwig really takes its time to fire up. I know that's not an indication of stability, but yeah it's a luxury we'll probably be able to afford in v4/v5 and up.

My uneducated guess for this slow startup is it's mounting a virtual machine with JRE (or something) to launch the app within this virtual machine. And if it's the case, I understand it's great for multi-os compatibility but secretely my spoiled inner-child is thinking "yuk". I'm sure I'm completely wrong... Am I?

Bitwig starts up in ~7 seconds for me (just tested), and as far as I recall has never taken much longer than that.

I'm on Windows 10, using the latest beta.

I've seen some people report much longer startup times than that though, so it certainly appears to be system specific.