Which areas are weird?

 

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2023

Ok so
Just to clarify to the rest of the community, im not slamming btwg4.4 and above, It really is an epic daw! Just Not for me in its present state!
Plus its horrifically buggy, we all use stuff thats a lil bit buggy here n there but just how bad btwg is with its critters i personally find unacceptable!
It could be the king of kings with a few simple adjustments.
Main thing for me is editing/ Bugs, heh ive forgotten the other things regarding v4 , im going to design a patch and sequence some drums within bitwig to refresh my memory as to why i havnt switched over
Its an incredible daw, the modular system is just epic, but it needs work still inmho..
Theres a million reasons why one would switch to bitwig from live,
And although theres only a handfull of reasons why youd stick with live, theyre reasons that i cannot ignore.
Im going to have to run btwg for a little while to remind myself why i only use it for sound design and not sequencing or cutting up samples also what i deem as weird for others is probably just normal

Oh and the browser is on one hand great but in practice its fundamentally flawed, and you cant drag multiple samples into the drum rack either, you have to individually drag n drop every sample which is useless
In a perfect world it would have a similar editing system to live, none of this pen n eraser crap ,wouldnt be a bug infested pain, and then id happily switch

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2023

You can drag multiple samples into the DM using a modifier key if I remember right. Always pay attention to the footer in Bitwig when performing an action. Typically there's useful information there.

Personally it's the only DAW I use and I don't encounter any bugs in my day to day work. Could just be that I'm not using those particular functions. IDK, but I'm aware some bug exist according to some users.

Personally I've only ever use the side browser, never got on with the pop up browser. Some people love the pop up but don't like the side browser. Preferences. I have no idea if I'll like the new browser in V5 as I haven't tried it yet. I know right now it's all buggy as of beta 3.

 

I tried so hard to use bitwig but get tired and come back to live.
i want to move because live becomes so slow on big projects, every commands needs a loading time and this is the worst thing in live for me.

i also dream with a daw with a fl studio tipe piano roll, bitwig when you press 3 you get a pencil but instead of changing pitch it changes the velocity with your mouse drag.
Bitwig browser i think is the worst of all daws, the playback for samples take ages to play and you can't do anything abou it. also can't find projects in browser like live, search by date and can't save templates like like, you save in a way tha is almos unusable.

This modulation thing is good but they should understand that music is not maeded of sound design and randomnly turning knobs. Music is maded with notes and arrangment. And they copy live in every single thing, even the bad things. Seems that doenst have any musician in the team, just kids turning knobs, to see what you come in a random way.
So they should improve the piano roll, the records funcions, made a low latency mode to record, a capture midi, a better and fast browser, possibility to change fader with mouse scroll. More musical and flued daw, and not a big synth.
Nobody need new devices, this new device thing is killing the daws development.

 

ableton live will never change, in 10 years they literally change some 3 shortcuts, but the way it is, is better than bitwig for me
and would be pretty easy to make bitwig 30x better than live, if they discover that music is not maded just by turning knobs!

 

What you found so buggy to that point, especially you as Live user who should be used to more than occasional crashes and slowed down interface, PDC bugs and all that stuff, so really want to know, what's so unacceptable about it?

 

Yeah, I'm lost on these criticisms as well. I moved from Live to Bitwig and literally the only thing I miss is the scale/fold function in Live's MIDI editor. Everything else is basically Ableton on Steroids, imo. The level with how fast they add new features is something that Ableton will never come close to. PDC in Ableton (or lack thereof) makes it almost unusable at times. The browser is instantaneous for me, live's lags horribly with larger sample libraries. Little things like non destructive audio consolidation just make it so quick to use. Maybe it just plays nice with my particular set up (Win 11, Ryzen 5900x)

 

i also discovered a automation problem on bitwig, what happens is pretty differente from what you see. they have pdc but no automation pdc. and ableton have automation pdc but no proper pdc. so there is no perfect daw.
but this is pretty problematic, they maded a most sofisticaded envelope daw but the envolopes doesn't follow what is in the screen

 

here you can see what i'm talking about

 

This is the number one reason why even after having made the switch years ago I still have this feeling in the back of my head that Bitwig is lacking something for me to consider it a full fledged audio production power station.
I can literally spend entire days, sometimes even skipping sleep, just making sounds and loving every second of it. In a sense it's the most powerful software instrument ever created.

But alas, there are a few peeves that just make it really difficult for me to see it as a tool that enhances productivity. Little details that I'm not even sure I could pinpoint, but the point you make is absolutely spot on : somehow, in my guts, I've never felt like Bitwig was the right tool for creating my own samples, organizing them, working them into an arrangement etc. which is even more frustrating when I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I can make really cool sounds with it in less time than it would take me to manually draw automation lanes in Ableton.
And I'm not shitting on Ableton either, I've really invested so much time and energy since day 1, and I came to a point where I knew Ableton better than I knew my own body. And I still think it's one of the greatest musical softwares ever created.

But all it took me was to spend one evening giving the Bitwig demo a try. I didn't even need to pack my bags, I left all my belongings with Ableton and ran naked into Bitwig's arms.
And I still don't regret it. Yes, my productivity (as in releasing actual music) has taken a significant toll since I made the move, but you know what? I've never considered myself a professional musician. I've made maybe 100 bucks from music in all my life. But even more important is the fact that what I value more than anything else in life is the sheer joy and magic of picking up an instrument and making stuff up as you go, creating beauty out of thin air by simply just "playing". Nothing in the software world can compare to spontaneously expressing myself with a guitar, but Bitwig comes really close to achieving that. The only other time I felt something similar was when I discovered modular synthesis with VCV Rack.

Speaking of which, you know how almost every single person with a Eurorack makes at some point a techno patch that sounds cool but would not in a quadrillion years be mistaken for an actual track? Sometimes I feel that way about Bitwig : it's by far my favorite software in the world, but it's a bit too much fun. When I'm looking at it, I don't want to go through the tedious but necessary steps to finish a track. And some of its little quirks make it actually annoying for that kind of work.

Regardless, I love it lol.

 

It can get even worse unfortunately, there's just handful of DAW's that actually have proper automation implementation

As you said previously, there's no perfect DAW, they all are flawed or just doesn't suit you, make the best out of the one you really dig, easy as that.

 

yes, but bitwig was the worst, and it really affected my mixes, becauso i do a lot of envelopes automation, i prefer to make a kind of lfo by hand insted of using a lfo, and bitwig responds pretty bad on transients in that case.
also when making a utility autmation of volume on the master channel it don't turn off on the right place !
thats pretty annoying!

 

Yeah, but it's not the worst implementation out there, if you gonna use Reaper or Pro Tools just because of that, guess that's what's most important to you, but none of the other DAW's will serve you any better, it's just circle of bugs and workarounds.

Remember watching some in the studio video with Chainsmokers, Live crashed on them and they needed to rebuild whole thing from scratch, continued to use it, Dada Life in one video were like on eggs expecting Live to crash anytime, saw Live crashing in videos, I mean, so what, that didn't stopped them from making music, tons of people who make serious money are used to that and keep using it, it suits them, if they can make music in Live, which is one of the weirdest DAW's out there IMO, nothing is stopping any of us to do the same in Bitwig. That's what I say to myself every time when I think grass is greener somewhere, people made music with Logic, who still have serious automation issues, people who are making millions lost work because of Live, still use it, what's stopping me, nothing. Pro Tools, that is industry standard, had PDC problems too, they deal with that manually, pro's, who mix billboard hits, that was huge workaround, but what was alternative, nothing, work that out and hope for the best, they fixed it, but it wasn't really like that and tons of music was done in it, nothing stopped that people from working.

 

Last edited: Apr 15, 2023

It's a nice point of view yours Dude, i use live and have a ton of crashes also by the way. and i also had a lot of crashes on bitwig too. actualy even more then live haha. audio engine is not so stable also, i can produce well on it, but for my workflow should improove more the composer side of it. Live also is not ideal in this aspect actualy.
I just wish daws focus more on piano roll man, everything start there and after it comes the rest.

 

Sorry to hear that, I had few plugin crashes, but it never took the DAW down, audio engine works flawlessly for me, maybe I just got lucky, was running everything prior V4 on dedicated audio Windows desktop machine with RME 9632 and now M1 Air where it works even better, much faster machine too which is expected, without dedicated audio interface, mainly on headphones these days with Realphones.

Support your piano roll wish, even tho I'm just editing notes in it mainly, there are space for all kinds of improvement, hope one of these days they will tackle it like they did with the rest.

 

Yes absolutley everything you articulated , Id had few too many if you know what i mean , so remembering quite why i dont really use it unless im playing around with bitwigs sound design capabilites is a problem and couldnt remember off hand all the reasons,

but it was something i simply play around with as i dont have a practical application for either
so theres then workflow which for me its tedious as hell compared to live,
so if im honest whilst i have an installation saved i do not have it installed,
i had to reinstall last night just to remember every single irritant and tbh i got really angry with my pc for whats all down to bitwig. and coudnt be arsed to carry on, i now remember the cons for me massivley outweigh any pros , and as for crashes in live yuh of course, but the bugs within btwg are biblical n far outweigh live

i almost feel as though too much attention has been payed to the gui , which is pretty yes, where live is clinical, but id happily have a clinical gui provided i get the work done
I think if youve just started then btwg is fine, but relearning workflow, which ive done from the hardware crossover years ago, from fl then to live , truth is ive no real world reason i would switch because id be giving myself mor work and hassle and i stand firm when i say live has an exceptional worflow methodolgy that as yet is not rivalled!!

 

Last edited: Apr 15, 2023

hah i know what your sayin, i used to have the eurorack with tonnes of modules acoss my wall , a long long time ago in a distant galaxy
Apologies btw, i shouldve selected the section i was responding to, its been a while since ive been on here

 

Yes i realise that myfriend!! i know how dragging and dropping multiple samples should work theoreticaly, the comping function does not work either , nor do a few other functions, not the way they should, as is the nature of an extremely buggy o:s inmho,
I wouldnt say i had an issue with selecting multiple samples , if i in fact didnt know how to select them in the first instance!!!