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Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 7:19 am
by beatz01
I wonder if there once will be a day when a new DAW (version) is released and it just...works.

You know, like with Photoshop or alike - Photoshop, Illustrator etc never have crashed on my computer.Not once.No updating problems, no crashing, no problems.Nothing.They just work.As advertised.As they should.

Amazing, isn't it ?

Why is that companies like Ableton or Bitwig have managed to brainwash customers into thinking releasing buggy beta versions but charging premium prices is a normal, "industry standard" way of doing business ?!

Really, it's one thing to constantly having to release bug fixes (because you didn't release a finished product in the first place) but in addition to that not even having the fixes working properly...i mean, come on.

Fed up with these companies getting away with these kind of practices.

Might even border on fraud in some countries..

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 7:31 am
by infernal.machine
You do realize Adobe is like a $10 billion dollar company, right? I don't know how much Ableton and Bitwig are worth, but I'm suspecting it may be a tiny bit less.

Also, Adobe Premiere crashed twice for me today. Live crashed zero times. Go figure.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:00 am
by beatz01
Doesn't have to do anything with how big your company is.

Point is, you either have a finished product or you haven't.

I'm not talking only bug(fixes) but also flaws like PDC etc.

You see, we've made ourselves so frigging dependend on programs like Live, we're already so used to the flaws and bugs we think it's normal.

When in reality it's more like you've been slowly downgraded to a full paying beta tester called "customer".

My other main gfx software is XaraX, which is a rather small company compared to Adobe, has also never crashed on me once.
And they seldomly to never release bugfixes - because they don't need to because the software just works perfectly as intended.If they feel it's time for a new version with new features, well they release a new version - that just works.They just don't release anything until it works.

Simple as that and used to be the "standard" once.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:30 am
by deva
Audio is quite different... A DAW has to interface with hundreds of different pieces of equipment... audio interfaces, mixers, midi controllers, hardware synths and effects, etc... in realtime, and with things like midi sync. Then there are all the complex plugins and huge disk streaming sample libraries.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 9:08 am
by mr.ergonomics
beatz01 wrote:I wonder if there once will be a day when a new DAW (version) is released and it just...works.

You know, like with Photoshop or alike - Photoshop, Illustrator etc never have crashed on my computer.Not once.No updating problems, no crashing, no problems.Nothing.They just work.As advertised.As they should.

Amazing, isn't it ?

Why is that companies like Ableton or Bitwig have managed to brainwash customers into thinking releasing buggy beta versions but charging premium prices is a normal, "industry standard" way of doing business ?!

Really, it's one thing to constantly having to release bug fixes (because you didn't release a finished product in the first place) but in addition to that not even having the fixes working properly...i mean, come on.

Fed up with these companies getting away with these kind of practices.

Might even border on fraud in some countries..
Just to keep things in perspective... I know a lot professionals who rant about Photoshop because it keeps crashing regularly on their macs at big projects :roll:

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 10:33 am
by re:dream
Fuck, I am going through a time when fucking MS Word is crashing on me. Several times a day. :evil:

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 10:52 am
by panten
mr.ergonomics wrote:Just to keep things in perspective... I know a lot professionals who rant about Photoshop because it keeps crashing regularly on their macs at big projects :roll:
If I'm honest I have to say that in my 10 years working as an Artist in Game Development Photoshop has crashed about 5 times.

However I feel the OP's pain as I unfortunately have to use 3D Software also dealing with constant crashes with Zbrush, Maya, Unreal Engine.

It's part of the job but every time it happens I sigh/curse/rage/schlump against the desk, take a deep breath then restart the package trying to remember what I did in the last 10 mins which is how long I have my AUTOSAVE set to.

When Ableton Live crashes I just shrug and restart the program, but that's probably because it's merely a hobby for me, if I relied on it as a source of income.. well that'd be a different matter.

Iterative Save is your friend.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 12:23 pm
by jlgrimes
beatz01 wrote:Doesn't have to do anything with how big your company is.

Point is, you either have a finished product or you haven't.

I'm not talking only bug(fixes) but also flaws like PDC etc.

You see, we've made ourselves so frigging dependend on programs like Live, we're already so used to the flaws and bugs we think it's normal.

When in reality it's more like you've been slowly downgraded to a full paying beta tester called "customer".

My other main gfx software is XaraX, which is a rather small company compared to Adobe, has also never crashed on me once.
And they seldomly to never release bugfixes - because they don't need to because the software just works perfectly as intended.If they feel it's time for a new version with new features, well they release a new version - that just works.They just don't release anything until it works.

Simple as that and used to be the "standard" once.

I think designing a more or less self containing program is much easier than something that has to host external programs, sync midi and audio streams, record everything with impeccable timing,handle automation and etc all at a low latency.


I would think a program like Photoshop would be a bit easier to get the bugs straightened out than something like Ableton.


Also just about every DAW has its share of bugs which lets you know how hard designing a good DAW must be.


Probably the DAW with the least amount of bugs is Reason but until recently that was probably one of the slowest developing DAW, and doesn't handle VSTs. But once you take VSTs out of the pictures most DAWs seem to perform very well.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:14 pm
by ImNotDedYet
Software development by it's nature is an inexact science. You're never going to get software that is 100% bug free. I've been doing it for 20+ years, and have yet to see an application that was built not have any issues. It's impossible to envision every potential way a user is going to interact with the software. It's impossible to know and plan for all the different system configurations your users are going to have.

On one hand, Ableton is in a bind because they have a very large code base that they're adding onto. The inability to fix PDC thus far is probably due to complications in the underlying code and the potential to break a whole lot of other stuff due to the audio engine code. Regression testing, or testing currently implemented features comes into play big time when releasing versions other than 1.0 versions. You have to have a pretty large staff in order to test all of these things. Throw in the complexity of Ableton and all it's potential connections, etc. and it's easy to see why some bugs get through.

Bitwig, on the other hand, is fortunate to have the ability to start from scratch. However, they likely have a much smaller team to find the bugs in the first place, now that they're putting out maintenance releases, they may not have the experience in knowing how users are using their software to accurately predict the bugs.

I guarantee you that even your beloved photoshop has and has had a number of bugs throughout it's product life, and it doesn't have to deal with nearly the technical issues that a DAW does with MIDI controllers, multiple platforms, VST support, etc. People often complain about their DAW crashing. Is it the DAWs fault or a third party M4L download? Bad third party VST? Something already installed on the computer hosting the DAW that doesn't like Live's audio processing - which is very processing heavy? Could it be a bad driver for a MIDI controller plugged into the computer that just happens to send the wrong thing at the wrong time that can't possibly be tested by Ableton/Bitwig?

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:45 pm
by musikmachine
The Finn wrote:Fuck, I am going through a time when fucking MS Word is crashing on me. Several times a day. :evil:
Have you sent crash reports/reinstalled windoze/thrown your computer out the window?

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:42 pm
by Machinesworking
Having messed around with DAWs since the late 90's and MIDI sequencers since the 80's I can say that if you think it's bad now you have no idea how good 'bad' is.

Early versions of Cubase, DP, Sonar, etc. using VSTs crashed all over the place. Mostly if you want a stable DAW, don't instal any plug ins in it. Propellerheads made a career out of not supporting VSTs, and they boasted rock solid stability because of it. On OS9 you could make Logic stable by systemwide disabling of the internet and various extensions, looking through the internet you could find lists of extensions to disable that would help etc. Mostly though you learned that making sure everything you put in was stable, you spent the time it takes to test all your VSTs by installing then in small batches in order to weed out problematic VSTs etc. Even to this day a couple years ago there was a version of NI Battery that would cause Live to be unstable. The fix was on Ni's side and it took an upgrade to go away...

Mostly though, I'm pretty happy, there might be a crash every once in a while, but it's been years since crashes were a problem that put me in a bad mood or killed a massive amount of work. DAWs are extremely complex and unlike a lot of people I thought for a new release Bitwig was pretty stable, but I have a history that gives me perspective.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:39 am
by smutek
beatz01 wrote: You know, like with Photoshop or alike - Photoshop, Illustrator etc never have crashed on my computer.Not once.No updating problems, no crashing, no problems.Nothing.They just work.As advertised.As they should.
You obviously don't work with these programs every day.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:47 am
by Angstrom
One hour ago - After Effects just locked up my machine so hard I had to turn the power off at the back.

Any time I use AE, In order to get previews to work right & to get the 'green line' (indicating a preview frame in RAM), and avoid "needs 2 frames to preview" errors, and to be able to use GPU acceleration I must .... open the app and purge the memory, then render out any large file which uses >50% of the system memory to trigger the app to actually assign the memory correctly to previews. This bug has been there for years.

So yes, all other programs are flawless gems floating in a perfect void of unsullied excellence.

or not

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 3:50 am
by One Reason
Angstrom wrote:One hour ago - After Effects just locked up my machine so hard I had to turn the power off at the back.

Any time I use AE, In order to get previews to work right & to get the 'green line' (indicating a preview frame in RAM), and avoid "needs 2 frames to preview" errors, and to be able to use GPU acceleration I must .... open the app and purge the memory, then render out any large file which uses >50% of the system memory to trigger the app to actually assign the memory correctly to previews. This bug has been there for years.

So yes, all other programs are flawless gems floating in a perfect void of unsullied excellence.

or not

Sounds like u have a low end system or GPU.. or both.... or not.

Having said that.. Photoshop, AE, Premiere, and Live have crashed on me thousands of times over the years.. more times than I care to remember.

and having said that, I understand the OP's point.. as a whole.. Software companies need to at least have a 90% stable package before releasing.. if ur a smaller company, tough shit.. then youll have to work harder and longer BEFORE u release.

Its true, were all being conditioned to think its normal to pay for crap software.

Save.. often.

Re: Ableton, Bitwig etc - get your act together !

Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 7:14 am
by GeoSuPhat
Hey Steve, he just called your 8080 weak sauce. :P