Live -> Bitwig - anyone looked back?

[elxsound]

Yes - I will buy Logic sooner or later, the value for that package is just insane. Although I hate the acquisitions of Redmatica and Camel, Apple have at least shown they are taking care of the IPs.

So you guys aren't missing anything from Live? At all?

/C

DrGonzo,

Disclaimer, I don't care much for the bashing that comes next, but the most replies you get on this topic will come from the same 3-4 people who always respond on this topic and they feed off each other bashing anyone that contradicts them. So I don't know how much honesty you expect to get out of this topic.

For whatever its worth, I actually just bought Logic X after not wanting to purchase because I didn't have my Logic 9 license for terribly long before LX came out (so it was my own personal protest against upgrading). As someone who owned both Alchemy and Redmatica software, I definitely understand. Still, I bought two nicely discounted Apple gift cards making it easier to finally chew and swallow that purchase.

I have used many DAWs over the years and in the end it came down to choosing a DAW to mix and then master in. I'm done with ProTools. Cubase (IMO) is king here (the features for mixing/mastering workflow are just amazing) but I have never liked Cubase's support back when I used to have Wavelab on Mac (but on PC I didn't need as much support). I have mixed feelings on Studio One (but love all the features they've added on), I have Reaper, but despite heavy customization I felt features were still just getting in the way of finishing things quickly, and then there's Logic... which is just a great value and seems to be improving more and more in ways that I don't expect Live or BW to focus on or become better than Logic at.

I don't know what your specific use case is for using a DAW, but even if you switch, if you're anything like me, then there's a fairly good chance that you'll still need Logic or Cubase, or ProTools or Studio One to compliment it.

[Trancit]

For this topic you should have a look in the youtube channel from Baphometrix:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuzDmH ... 7GA/videos
as he does always compare the shown Bitwig features with what is available in Live...

Especially this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nadjzN8y2f8

That should give you a pretty good idea, what Bitwig does better (even if his vids are a bit complicated and long-winded)

[ThomasHelzle]

I switched from Ableton Live 8 to Bitwig 1.0.
The Live 9 beta showed very clearly to me that these people have lost it for what I'm interested in.
Live 10 again showed me I did bet on the right horse with BWS.

Interesting... just by personal curiosity, what exactly did you feel Ableton lost?

/C

I use a lot of different software applications and many of them, after a certain time, lose their agility and ability to do really new things and get set in their ways. Old software is harder to change, but also the company and the developers get less and less innovative and less "curious".
This happened to companies like Adobe, who when I started using Photoshop still were a "startup" (initially Photoshop had been written to help with the first Starwars movie) and very interested in getting people to use their software and getting better all the time. Over time that "freshness" if you will is getting lost in most companies.

I personally want to work with software and people who are still fresh, curious and hungry and able to shake up the established ways of doing things - which in turn inspires me and allows me to constantly learn new stuff and do new things.

During the Live 9 beta, I personally was appalled by the direction the browser was taking and several other things. Reading what the developer working on the database, search and browser had to say was disturbing, since it showed a strong disconnection with reality.
One other user made a lot of very good suggestions and at one point, one of the devs wrote that this other user "had a way to make his suggestions sound like good ideas" but that they weren't. Since I agreed with pretty much all this particular user did suggest, I wondered how that was supposed to work, since on the other hand, the new stuff in Live 9 did not at all sound like good ideas to me (and to this day, I don't think they were - so I left Live behind).

I didn't like Max4Live either and found it a clumsy way to put pseudo-flexibility into an otherwise very rigid DAW, which Live in my view has become.

So it totally depends on what you are looking for, for me, software is so much part of my life that I am very specific with what kind of software and companies I want to deal with to that extent.

Cheers,

Tom

[V0RT3X]

I often load up Live for it's sampling and warping abilities. I also have plenty of custom (Live only) FX presets and AU plugins that i particularly enjoy so having both on my system is useful. Occasionally I'll also have another person working with me on my system who has no idea how to use Bitwig but is familiar with Live.

[toonertik]

During the Live 8 beta, I personally was appalled by the direction the browser was taking and several other things. Reading what the developer working on the database, search and browser had to say was disturbing, since it showed a strong disconnection with reality.
One other user made a lot of very good suggestions and at one point, one of the devs wrote that this other user "had a way to make his suggestions sound like good ideas" but that they weren't. Since I agreed with pretty much all this particular user did suggest, I wondered how that was supposed to work, since on the other hand, the new stuff in Live 9 did not at all sound like good ideas to me (and to this day, I don't think they were - so I left Live behind).

I didn't like Max4Live either and found it a clumsy way to put pseudo-flexibility into an otherwise very rigid DAW, which Live in my view has become.

So it totally depends on what you are looking for, for me, software is so much part of my life that I am very specific with what kind of software and companies I want to deal with to that extent.

Cheers,

Tom

This ^^^

[DrGonzo]

Disclaimer, I don't care much for the bashing that comes next, but the most replies you get on this topic will come from the same 3-4 people who always respond on this topic and they feed off each other bashing anyone that contradicts them. So I don't know how much honesty you expect to get out of this topic.

Kvr have started to surprise me last couple of years. Gone are most of the absolute bone-heads and more often than not it's possible to have a sensible discussion about things without bringing out the knives. Weirdly enough it looks like that role has now been taken over by Gearslutz which starting to get a flavour of MPC Forums.

/C

[DrGonzo]

During the Live 8 beta, I personally was appalled by the direction the browser was taking and several other things. Reading what the developer working on the database, search and browser had to say was disturbing, since it showed a strong disconnection with reality.

I remember that feeling with L8 came out as well. That was not a good release. The browser was/is truly appalling. I kind of forgot about that - I'm so used to it by now. And the M4L stuff, feels a bit like building a tree-house on top of a real house. But in my world - they seem to have partly have woken up with L10. The favourite colour-thingy is not bad and the pre-emptive MIDI record-thingy is a daily life saver for me in my work.

Thanks for posting your feelings about it. Good points.

/C

[SLiC]

I still have Live 9, but I use Bitwig most of the time where I would have used Live. There are just a few things in BW that I have got used to having and miss to much when I tried Live again (10). The pop up browser, in clip editing, unified modulation and a much better (hybrid) arranger. Iactulay now consider the subscription model an advantage (I was against it initially) as I enjoy getting 3 big updates a year.

Live still has advantages, aside from some features that Bitwig doesn’t yet have it is pretty much an industry standard so you will find more books, articles, sample packs and hardware support.

[xbitz]

forgot to mention but I miss ClyphX too (which enables controlling of AL from its arranger)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvbRfWcwbuU
luckily "Piz MIDI midi2qwerty16 - Use MIDI to trigger fake keystrokes to the focused window." and keyboard mapping of BWS can do the same, so clips(or scenes or whatever) can be launched from the arranger for ex. using it

(personally I'm big fan of FL blocks mode or the pattern based workflow)

[pdxindy]

Disclaimer, I don't care much for the bashing that comes next, but the most replies you get on this topic will come from the same 3-4 people who always respond on this topic and they feed off each other bashing anyone that contradicts them. So I don't know how much honesty you expect to get out of this topic.

Kvr have started to surprise me last couple of years. Gone are most of the absolute bone-heads and more often than not it's possible to have a sensible discussion about things without bringing out the knives. Weirdly enough it looks like that role has now been taken over by Gearslutz which starting to get a flavour of MPC Forums.

/C

Gearslutz is pretty bad... KVR looks good by comparison

[DrGonzo]

Guys... yesterday I spent some quality time with Bitwig and I remember what I liked about it back at v1. There is something nice about the UI. But boy if it doesn't confuse the hell out of me. It's like when I moved from Cubase to Live. It was total confusion - but I managed to make my best music ever during that time so I am ready for the ride.

For you guys who moved over from Live to Bitwig - what was the most confusing parts about the transition? Or to put it from a different angle - when did Bitwig "click" for you?

/C

[antic604]

During the Live 8 beta, I personally was appalled by the direction the browser was taking and several other things. Reading what the developer working on the database, search and browser had to say was disturbing, since it showed a strong disconnection with reality.

That's still the case, which is evident by (at least) those three cases:

- v10 introduced separate "view modes" to edit clips and to edit automation (switchable by "A"), so you can't anymore have a single view where on one track you're editing audio clips, on second track you have a MIDI clip and edit the notes in lower pane and on the 3rd track you adjust automation to work with the other two; you now have to switch the views, which BTW coincides with C-note if you're using computer keyboard as a MIDI keyboard; they confirmed they KNEW this will piss off a lot of users, but they went ahead with it anyway because some users complained that they click automation accidentally when they want to do something else - I mean who are those users? kinder garden children? There was host of other issues with this (like inability to quickly show/hide all automation lanes per track that existed in v9, lack of visual feedback that you actually record some automation live when you're in "content mode"), some of which were fixed, but most were not. It's a hot mess, still.

- v10 also finally added touchpad gestures in Windows for zooming & scrolling, which should be great, right?! But the worst part was they had to observe & analyze other users struggling with dragging the timeline (way to do it in v9 and earlier), because they were not realising 99% of other software uses trackpad (with modifier keys) to scroll & zoom stuff!!! They all live in a bubble!

- "integrated" M4L; I'm writing this in quote marks because it's not really integrated - they're just not showing the splash screen anymore. So the issue is that some of the "integrated" M4L devices - LFO, Shaper, Env. Follower - were "coded" using a different library/function compared to their versions in v9, so now when you scroll the device chain their display detaches from the device and lags behind, which looks like it's about to crash. What was the answer of Ableton (and many users defending them)? The new library/function simply works that way, because it renders the graphics differently and simply wasn't designed for how it's used. In a EUR600 professional software



I'm not saying Bitwig devs are saints and always do what's right, but I've never been as pissed of as I were testing the v10 open beta AND reading the justification why they made some changes...

[ThomasHelzle]

Interesting antic604.

Yeah, similar things happened in the Live 9 beta (I had a typo above, I didn't refer to the Live 8 beta but to the open beta of Live 9). In Live 8 you still had a browser that was directly showing you what's on your harddrive (as it should be). But the search function was abysmally slow, it could take literally hours for a single search in just my audio files when I had on the same machine a search software that took only a couple of seconds or in extreme cases maybe minutes to search all my 3-4 harddrives without any index...
Or my mail software doing a real time search while typing the search phrase over years of mail in it's fulltext.

Then in the live 9 beta with the new browser, the indexing could literally take days (again for the same machine) and the devs somehow thought it to be normal. And since you no longer could access files directly in the browser, I was totally baffled how that was supposed to work (if for instance you plugged in an external drive and then had to wait hours until it was indexed). And their arguments were totally disconnected from anything a user might need or want in the real world. Ever.
I found that scary and I just didn't want to be part of that kind of process.

Of course devs have a totally different view on what a certain solution might entail, how complicated it is to implement or what the long term ramifications may be for the software as a whole, so it's normal that some things just don't make sense to their code-centric view that a user takes as a given. And I am (mostly ) totally fine with that.
But after using a megaton of software for something like 30 years now, I developed a "nose" for companies that start to "stink" and where reality just doesn't come into it much anymore.
The same happened to me with Adobe, when one of their Photoshop developers argued to death on the forums about the alpha channel in openEXR files and couldn't even be convinced by the main developer of that same openEXR format that his view was just wrong. In the end he was forced by his managers to implement a requester when opening an EXR file how the alpha should be treated. One could hear him grind his teeth every time that requester came up...
And their specific subscription scheme made it very clear that I should go look for alternatives, which thankfully I found.

But yeah, meeting the BWS devs on the Musikmesse 2013 made it clear to me that these were totally different people and that I could relate to them and their approach and passion. Nothing is perfect ever (and I don't even think perfection should be a goal), but the approach and motivation behind a company is quite important for me.
And the software itself as well as the GUI just clicked with me right away.

So this also is part why a purely feature by feature comparison or looking too much at the price only go so far. What good is a free DAW like Sonar if you didn't like it even when it was several hundred bucks...

But all of this is of course very personal, so I'm only talking about my own experiences.

Cheers,

Tom

[pdxindy]

For you guys who moved over from Live to Bitwig - what was the most confusing parts about the transition? Or to put it from a different angle - when did Bitwig "click" for you?

/C

The interface and basic concepts of Bitwig clicked right away. Early on it was just too unstable and had too many bugs/oddities, so I did not switch right away. I'd say it was only about a year ago that Bitwig felt like it was finally getting over the new software hump. And not only was it a brand new software, but a brand new company at the same time. I'm sure they got some entertaining stories of the steep learning curve!

While there is still functionality I would like to see added, improved, there isn't really anything I am disliking about Bitwig. It is fast and straightforward to do the basic stuff and the Dev's seem to have a good eye for that.

[xbitz]

^^^ crashing ... https://www.google.hu/search?q=live+9+c ... 1068&dpr=2 d'oh and really I've totally forgotten the crashing problem using BWS