LinuxMusicians

I'm using Bitwig Stu for music creation (Mixbus32C for mixing) since version 1.x on various versions of Linux Mint KDE (Ubuntu-based). It runs fine although lately I have seen that it can start some disk activity without any feedback in its UI eg. without the clickable spinning disk. Stealth disk scanning. It can last up to 4 minutes and is intense. The computer processes ar eslowing down during that time. It scans the Project directory which used to have somewhere around 620 projects. I move 550 of them in another directory that Bitwig is not aware of and that has dramatically cut the disk scanning time although, if I use Bitwig Stu file dialog and navigate to that directory load a project Bitwig Stu will insist on scanning that directory (in a 'stealth' manner) with 550 projects which then goes back to square one and taking a few minutes to do during which time it is impossible to load a project using any Windows plugin as the machine becomes so slow that there's a timeout occurring with linvst. Bitwig Stu can launch such a 'stealth' disk scan at anytime.

I have dropped a word to Bitwig Stu support, the guy could not believe it. Actually he said something close to it being impossible. I then sent the screen shot below and haven't heard about them yet.

This problem has nothing to do with the creative aspects which are working fine. It is a bit scary though as it looks like there can be problems in loading any of those 550 projects.

Apart from that, Bitwig Stu works very fine. Not sure if I'll be 'subscribing' to updates in the coming year. I think I will wait a year to see what's going on. Last year I did subscribe and yes, there was the new sampler and a few other things but nothing that much for the some $150 they are asking for a year worth of updates.

I would still recommend Bitwig Stu for music creation. The concept of Scenes and Clips that can be re-arranged in any which way (and driven by a Launchpad) and recorded into an Arranger for a more regular type of editing is quite nice.

Thanks for the description. The scanning issue is really creepy, especially as the Bitwig guys don't have a clue what's going on.
I played again with it and my impression is:

Very simple with not too many functions, can be learned completely within 1-2 days. Reaper offers a lot more functions and is more flexible. Downfall is you might get lost in Reaper because of that.

Midi editor is lacking a lot of functions. It is a bit more functional than the Ardour midi editor, but close to that one. Switching of tools is comparable to Ardour and can be tedious sometimes. This is by far better solved in Reaper. There are also no chord, scale input functionalities.

Clips are great and a good tool to try out different ideas and to arrange the clips in the timeline to make a track. I didn't figure out yet how to mark different regions of a song and to arrange a track by dragging around whole regions. This can be easily done in Reaper.

Modulations are cool and it's fun to play with it. Most of the things will work in Reaper too, but it's not that much fun and more fiddling.

CPU efficiency seems to be very good.

Eye candy

Interesting. And its always interesting to know about how things are done in other environments.

What functions are missing from MIDI editing ?

What do you mean by 'switching of tools' ? For instance if there's u-he ACE on a track, I simply double click on u-he Hive in the right pane for Hive to replace ACE. If there's MDelayMB after Hive, then I click on it and press backspace and it's gone. Replacing it by a reverb is a matter of double-clicking on the reverb in the right pane. How can it be simpler than that ? And, how can it be tedious. There must be a misunderstanding about what a 'switching of tools' is.

I never enter chords manually, I play them, so it never occurred to me that a manual chord input could be missing from MIDI editing.

The Clips and Scenes are played live in the Arranger. It's like playing an instrument perhaps, especially if one uses a Launchpad. Once the clip 'performance' (eg. the whole song) is recorded in the Arranger timeline I often move things further depending on developments. Vertically across say 25 tracks I first make sure that all region segments are starting and ending at the same bars. If needed I cut segments (5 on the keyboard, 1 to get back to the arrow). Then I select the top one, press shift, and select the bottom one. All regions are thus selected and ready to be moved. Sometimes I might add an empty audio track at the top to make room to easily get the cross cursor to select regions by hovering the mouse.

Yes, the modulations are pretty neat. The sampler is not bad either, and the Phase4 synth can be useful.

For me what was the opening of the creative gate were the Scenes and Clips. This is such a big change from a traditional DAW like Ardour/Mixbus. Being able to freely and easily move every clip everywhere is great.

Cheers.

In Reaper you can enter notes by clicking Insert or delete them with delete, which is much faster than clicking with the mouse as you can enter many notes very fast by just holding the key. Also the velocity adjustment is strange as you have to click every single note. It's much faster in Reaper (maybe I oversee something at the moment). Beside of that it's ok.

With switching tools I mean switching between pencil, scissor, etc. A better use of the right mouse key (e.g. to select notes) would be much more handy.

I'll try if I can "emulate" something like the clip feature in Reaper. There's a playlist feature which could be used for this, though it's not the real thing.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=69222

Entering notes manually is not something I do much. I quantize them manually, though. For adjusting the volume of several notes, simply select them and look at the inspector (left) side bar. You can adjust the gain there for all selected notes. Recently I'm paying attention also to the Release Velocity value just below the gain.

For switching tools, the keys 1 to 5 are used. Press a key quickly and it will change, press it for a longer time and it will only be temporary.

It might be possible to emulate clips in Reaper, although the core of it are the Scenes. Eg. the X-Y grid of Clips and Scenes.

Actually there's a Reaper extension, but not for Linux yet.

https://www.helgoboss.org/projects/playtime/

Was playing a bit more today and saw that in Bitwig I get sporadic xruns, although DSP load is very low on the order of ~15% only. Maybe these are very sharp spikes or something else is going on. No problems with other DAWs, must be a BITWIG specific issue.

@Jonetsu: I've seen @KVR that you had similar problems. Did you find the cause of that?

Second thing is that for some plugins (the ones that doesn't come up with a preset list window) I don't see where the presets can be chosen.

I have been using Bitwig on Debian since version 1. I have previous experience with many of the Linux DAWs.

I worked in music production for many tears in a past life and worked with a lot of different DAWs/sequencers on Mac, Atari, Amiga and PCs.

Bitwig is pretty flexible, has an intuitive interface and has more tools than most people know how to use.

I consider it the most well rounded DAW for Linux for most people. It is also always in active development by a large team, including one very good Linux developer.

There are more specialized DAWs for Linux that may have advantages for one specific method, but Bitwig does seem to be the best all around from what I can see.

There's absolutely no official support when using a distro other than Ubuntu? Did anyone every try this?

Just realized that there's no phase correlation meter in Bitwig?