Ableton Forum

CFM wrote:I'm just not sure more and more features really help creating music.

If a guitar has a really high/tight action you can still make music on it, but it wears your hand out pressing down the fucking strings. There's nothing wrong with wanting a guitar with better action.

Having tons of optional features isn't necessarily a bad thing if the UI remains clear and easy to use.

tone61 wrote:Having tons of optional features isn't necessarily a bad thing if the UI remains clear and easy to use.

I completely agree, I would even add that it "helps to create music" especially on a computer.

I do CG work for a living, and there's some features in some programs that you wish every software company would adopt.
Like a hot key for 'repeat last command.'
Photoshop doesn't have this feature, I still am able to paint/work with it, but it sure would be a nice enhancement.

The more I see these Bitwig teasers the more it looks like those guys are thinking about those kinds of things, a sort of elegance to a complex UI.
It doesn't surprise me that it makes Bitwig appear to have a fresh take on things, giving them more freedom from old ideals so they can decide to implement new features effectively.

Really looking forward to trying it.

Couldn't agree with juansolo more. I also do CG for a living and some of the more forward thinking modelling applications are very complex yet versatile. The best being Nvil which gives you the building blocks to create your own tool.
You can pretty much do away with the UI completely and work with 'smart hotkeys'

CFM wrote:There is a lot of talk about midi here… but Live was never designed like a traditional DAW – if you want 1000 midi features then maybe Cakewalk, Cubase, or ‘the other one for MAC’ (use to be Emagic) or pro-tools may have been a better choice?

But they don't have what Live has... So if Bitwig offers the Live paradigm, but has some better midi features, then that will be interesting to people who fundamentally like Live but would like some better midi features... the ability to add some randomization in a fast intuitive way to velocity for example.

eyeknow wrote:But seriously.......2 years + is not a concern?

I can actually make music in live (regardless of the limitations) but I CANNOT with bitwig.

2 years for a well made complex software is not long at all...

deva wrote:

eyeknow wrote:But seriously.......2 years + is not a concern?

I can actually make music in live (regardless of the limitations) but I CANNOT with bitwig.

2 years for a well made complex software is not long at all...

true, but the truth is... they're around the 5 year mark.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116571&hilit=+bitwig

Founded in 2009 according to their web site.

If they were making a simple app like Live v1 I'd say yes, that took a long time to make. However, as they appear to be creating something more akin to Live 9 (which took 14 years) I'd say they are ahead of schedule.

Will bitwig be buggy, underfeatured, weird, uncomfortable? Very, very likely. But it is most importantly an option to Ableton, who have fallen in love with the walled garden approach of Apple, and wish to recreate it.

I do not wish to be walled into a garden.

It took the devs a while to make Studio One as well. I don't think that the BitWig devs have spent an overage of time developing BWS. Besides, who cares if their own estimates were wrong? It affects them more than it affects me.

And I'm no fanboi of BWS. I don't wave anyone's flag. But I do love competition especially when it benefits me. I didn't upgrade to L9 because it didn't have a good cost/benefit ratio for me. But I probably will upgrade to L10 (at least I'll sit the money aside). In the meantime, if BWS gets their stuff together they may make a customer out of me. It has zero affect on me being an Ableton customer at this point.

CFM wrote:I'm just not sure more and more features really help creating music. Cakewalk (which I used until version 8)had this philosophy - pop in every feature that users mentioned, add more and more...

Because wanting an actually robust PDC implementation, an up to date midi editor* and similar core functionality, directly and positively impacting what it feels like to make music in this environment, is the same thing as wanting to add more and more and more of feature bloat, riiight. I think I said "straw man" in this thread once already

JuanSOLO got exactly what I meant. And ironically, what Ableton initially did with Live 9 was for a large part exactly what CFM is describing: adding bells and whistles and huge secondary features (which even broke some previous solid functionality like file system browsing) without addressing the shortcomings of the core stuff.

(* an "up to date midi editor" is most definitely different from "a midi editor with countless special operations and bells and whistles" too, by the way. Looking at it from the good old Ableton perspective, having a simple and elegant way to script actions and define macros would be much more to the point and "in the core" than a crapload of predefined ones, anyway. But I digress, this wasn't even about that.)

H20nly wrote:

deva wrote:

eyeknow wrote:But seriously.......2 years + is not a concern?

I can actually make music in live (regardless of the limitations) but I CANNOT with bitwig.

2 years for a well made complex software is not long at all...

true, but the truth is... they're around the 5 year mark.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116571&hilit=+bitwig

Founded in 2009 according to their web site.

yep, in March 2009 Bitwig won the IT-Gründer price of the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie). The award took place at the CeBit in Hannover and was 25,000€...
https://it-gipfelblog.hpi-web.de/2009/0 ... -cebit-09/ (german interview with Volker Schumacher of Bitwig)...

funny thing is: the interviewer asks him about his visions for the company and where Bitwig hopefully will be in 5 years (meaning in 2014)...

So their minor update 1.00 to 1.05 will also take forever...
"The fix will be release soon!" = 1 year

metaparadigma wrote:funny thing is: the interviewer asks him about his visions for the company and where Bitwig hopefully will be in 5 years (meaning in 2014)...

site contains a little more German than i can handle... ok, a lot more. what was the answer?

H20nly wrote:

metaparadigma wrote:funny thing is: the interviewer asks him about his visions for the company and where Bitwig hopefully will be in 5 years (meaning in 2014)...

site contains a little more German than i can handle... ok, a lot more. what was the answer?

The key translated section is this:

My main hope, for five years you say? If I can dream I would say that I hope we have a thread on the Ableton forum which stretches to 150 pages. Perhaps more. Yes, ultimately that is our goal. A giant meandering stream of guesses and speculation, odd ideas and recriminations. It's perhaps unrealistic, but you have to dream. And then I guess, uh, a version one. Yeah. Then I guess we should release something. Yeah

My translation might be a off, my German is a bit rusty.
He got damp.

of course,... when all else fails: infamy