Bitwig Studio 6 Details Revealed, and Editing Gets a Big Boost
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The music production world is abuzz with the latest update to Bitwig Studio 6, sparking a lively discussion about the software's rapid evolution and how it stacks up against rival Ableton. Commenters rave about Bitwig's breakneck development pace, with some attributing it to the company's founders being hands-on lead engineers, aligning incentives and driving innovation. A heated debate erupts over Ableton's customer support, with some sharing horror stories of ignored bug reports and dismissive responses from the CEO, while others counter with positive experiences, highlighting the subjective nature of these interactions. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that Bitwig's momentum is making waves, with some users considering a switch from Ableton, drawn by the promise of a more responsive and rapidly evolving digital audio workstation.
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I’m staying away from 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.
I did not like Ableton to begin with anyways.
If anything, it is confirmation bias.
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.
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.
From a single source, hearing only their side, anecdotically, wont be much better...
I'm not finding any first-hand sources about it, but remember that most articles at the time mentioned it one way or another.
Not saying your experience wasn’t as you describe it, just want to say that I personally rate him highly and was surprised to read it.
I did the same with Bitwig in 2022 and the bug it's still there.
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...
Also love FL Studio. They've made amazing changes over the years. Now they're... Experimenting more with AI. Not a big fan.
The audio version of Photoshop.
The engine and everything else is C++.
"And for others that also don't know, a great example on how to do cool UIs with Java"
This is vague, and could mean either it's a "cool GUI app (end-to-end) in Java" or "cool GUI app (with just the GUI) in Java".
Think how one could say the same thing you said for a 100% Java app too, e.g. "jEdit/NetBeans/etc is a great example on how to do cool UIs with Java".
I added the explicit information that the Java part is constrained to the UI, and clarified what the backend is written in.
It should be Hacker News' official DAW. :)
It's very rare, especially in 2025, that I would use a GUI and think "I wish I could do x" and then actually be able to make it happen.
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.
https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/reascript/reascripthelp.html
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!
What sort of scripting are you doing?
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!
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."
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I'd call it "reverse engineer" even, you'd do something like:
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.
Lots of hardware has decent hardware integration with live - a push might be interesting…
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.
Does your goal involve a DAW?
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 :)
Now Strudel...
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
But Zrythm is true libre software and the UI is wildly better and on par with Bitwig and Ableton
https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
(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.)
Here's a couple tracks I've made with it: https://synth8.bandcamp.com/track/spring-trap, https://synth8.bandcamp.com/track/prompt
It had a unique routing UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz#/media/File:BuzzS...) that allowed you to chain sources and effects using a graph. Bitwig has a similar idea in The Grid (https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/), though that's limited to just one track; Buzz did this for the entire composition.
There was at least one rewrite attempt, and there are various clones (Aldrin) but they never quite made it.
Yeah, lemme go ahead and commit this code I've been working on for weeks without creating a repo...
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).
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=590922
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwJWhXceVg
[1]: https://dirtywave.com/products/m8-tracker-model-02
Also slightly easier to get hold of!
Bitwig rules.
Polarity has never stopped making Bitwig content and I've learned an absolute ton of stuff from him.
https://youtube.com/polaritydnb/
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
https://musictech.com/news/bitwig-studio-4-spectral-suite-ap...
I think it's weird to praise not adding useful features.
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.
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".
Would love if The Grid would get some kind of scripting support.
Also, a bit related and a bit not. Has anyone checked out Strudel? The musical programming language?
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.
My email is in my profile.
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.
Just to call out a pretty universal use case for stem separation…
Ah, the classic "you use it different, you are not serious" argument.
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 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'm with Ableton because I love the push hardware and ui, but everyone's different.
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
But there's a new FOSS DAW called Zrythm that is essentially a featureful clone of Bitwig I'd recommend
https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
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.
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.
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