[LAU] Bitwig: what we can learn from it

rosea.grammostola rosea.grammostola at gmail.com
Sun Mar 30 13:10:51 UTC 2014


On 03/30/2014 12:27 PM, Louigi Verona wrote:
> What we can learn from Bitwig is that they base their work on 
> musician's needs. And their whole application is tailored towards a 
> musician getting his work done easier and more efficiently.
>
> In Linux Audio very often the basis is a curious technical idea that 
> might have little to do with doing music. As a made-up example "why 
> not create a framework that will have all the midi connections in one 
> place and it will dynamically reassign those connections and plug them 
> using my new format that everyone will have to adapt because it is 
> such a great and efficient format".
> This is a strictly technical passion. Commercial projects tend to 
> figure out what their users actually want.
>
>
> Even right now in this thread I see people suggesting many cool 
> technical feats, but I see little interest in trying to understand 
> what musicians might want. As I usually write, sometimes getting 
> heated metaphors back at myself for that, often a musician needs some 
> basic stuff first.
>
> I spoke about no Linux sampler supporting WAVE loops, although all 
> Windows DAWs do.
> Or that no sf2 player has volume envelope, although most non-Linux sf2 
> players do.
>
> And the reason for this is because people are doing software for 
> themselves and not necessarily for others. This is not good or bad, 
> this is just how it is. You decide whether you want to change this or not.


It's true, the attention to workflow and needs of musicians of Bitwig is 
impressive.
I'm sure I'll be aware even more of it's possibilities if someone shows 
me what you can do in Bitwig exactly.

On the other hand, looking at Bitwig I'm not sure whether I should be 
more impressed by Biwtig or by the achievements of the linuxuadio 
community, of what is possible with Floss Linuxaudio already. And yes 
impressed also by the technical infrastructure. I mean, what you get 
from Bitwig is portaudio, that's almost a shame for a 300 euro app from 
a linuxaudio-user pov. Also it lacks OSC, LADSPA, LV2 and NSM support. 
Stuff you'll find in Ardour for instance.

Also the quality in sound(instruments/samples) they give you for your 
300 euro, is not impressive for me, don't get fooled. But this seems to 
be cultural thing, the acceptance of low quality sound.

My conclusion so far is that Bitwig gives you what Linuxaudio lack too 
often, smooth workflow and 'completeness' of features. This is a major 
thing for people who want to make music!

On the other hand, apart from very sophisticated features for making 
beats etc., a lot could be possible with Linuxaudio tools or is already 
possible today.

The challenge today is to make Linuxaudio tools more friendly and 
complete for musicians and integrate them better with each other. With 
metadata in JACK, NSM, OSC it should be possible to improve this more 
and more. It would be nice to launch Non-Timeline in a NSM session with 
Carla and control Carla by Non-Timeline via OSC for instance.


\r







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