I am playing around with Bitwig now since its release and am quite happy with most of it. It´s definitely out of the "giant beta-stage" that was mentioned here before. Some things still need improvement like the sampler which lacks a lot of functionality if you are used to Abletons sampler. But i guess there is more to come at least i am hoping, after reading about sampler vst´s in some forums where i stumbled upon this:
Shortcircuit (make sure you get v1.1.2). Once a very pricey piece of commercial software, this plugin was built by a talented developer who later worked for Ableton and now develops Bitwig Studio.
Bitwig rarely crashed on me, but i think i still would use Live if i were to use it in a live context. As a DAW however Bitwig´s playful devices and way to combine thing has really catched my interest. Push is now fully integrated but i don't have Push and am using a Livid BaseII instead. Generally the scripts are really well thought. I am loving my Akai MPK25 and its no biggy for me, that there is no manual user midi-mapping of the global transport controls, because they are mapped in the Akai…
What i also enjoyed is the personal contact with the Bitwig team, the support is fast and friendly. Because i was an early buyer, i was invited to the 1up party where i could talk to the developers. And this week i got invited to a Bitwig course in Berlin, that takes 1 1/2 hours, for free. These guys have spirit. After talking to some member of the team i also realised why it took them so long to come up with the first release and why they are so fast with updates now. Every single line of code in Bitwig is either written by themselves or open source. All the other companies with exception of the Propellerhead Reason guys (which they admire) are buying big amounts of code to avoid this time consuming coding process. The problem is, if there is some bug they cannot fix it so easy and also it´s more complicated to implement absolutely new things. This is the reason why the decided not to support Mac audio units (it´s a pity since some plugin only come as AU´s) but it´s also the reason why the fire out new features now every two month´s or so…
Since i got Bitwig i did not use Live so often anymore and decided not to make the pricy jump to Live9. One thing that i really miss though is the big community of users sharing tips and tricks since Bitwig is so fresh in the market, but i have the feeling that is about to change