Bitwig Controversy

[Largos]

Seems they've upset a lot of people. Their purchases/upgrades include all updates for the following 12 months but they've released a set of plugins for it under a name of "Spectral Suite" as a paid addon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUY6njJ2Bus

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comment ... en_letter/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comment ... /scumbags/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comment ... _it_is_in/

[sunrat]

I don't get it. Spectral Suite is a new add-on pack for Bitwig, not an already present component, right? Why would people expect it to be part of updates to their current software?
It's commercial software and offering paid add-ons is common already. Tracktion Waveform offer paid add-on packs. Harrison Mixbus offers premium XT and AVA plugins as paid extras.
Maybe Bitwig were clumsy in introducing this, but the amount of outrage seems disproportional.

[sysrqer]

I don't get it. Spectral Suite is a new add-on pack for Bitwig, not an already present component, right? Why would people expect it to be part of updates to their current software?

Because people who bought a plan were promised all software updates for a year, that was the whole point of their business model. They changed their website to try to hide this. Their EULA states that users get all updates during their plan, including any addons (it specifically states this), so they have broken that as well. People are rightly concerned that this changes everything, where good features will be behind a paywall meaning that the regular update plan will effectively become a cost to get maintenance updates. They developed this "new product" with the dev time that users had paid for and which had been promised to be used to provide updates they had already paid for within the last year. Interesting and specialised features were always part of the upgrade, such as the grid, but it seems this is no longer the case.

I don't think anyone is against them creating a new product and increasing revenue but this fiasco has been incredibly poorly done and lots of users feel betrayed and are questioning the legality of it. Many are also concerned that this is a major sign that the company is not in a good state and that their desperation will cause people to not renew their plan which will ultimately lead to a much sparser income, effectively creating a death spiral for them.

Then there is the silence from them. No real clarification on their position, no roadmap, or any other indication of wanting to explain why this was done or what users can expect in the future. On top of the rest of it, it leaves a bad taste in users' mouths.

If I ever upgrade again it will not be done with the faith that they will produce good updates in that year, nor because I want to support them, but because they have already released enough features to make it worth it. Before last week I would have renewed every year because I love the product but this bait and switch, and going against their own EULA, has broken trust in the company.

[Largos]

I also wonder why a company pushing an open plugin format this year is themselves making plugins that only work in their own DAW.

[sysrqer]

A sceptical answer is that they want to lock people in to having to pay for a full upgrade on top of the cost of new addon, which only runs on the latest version of Bitwig.

It would have made much more sense of them to have released these as CLAP and they wouldn't have had most of the community rallying against them. Foolish.

[Eli]

only runs on the latest version of Bitwig.

That really sucks. Was planning on buying those plugins but haven't been up-to-date in quite a while.

[tavasti]

Bitwig realized they can't do that, and now those spectral-things are included in bitwig 4.4

https://www.bitwig.com/spectral-suite/

bitwig.jpg (18.58 KiB) Viewed 3216 times

https://www.bitwig.com/stories/to-our-community-218/

Edit: and lucky me, I have my upgrades still, so I will get it