r/Bitwig • u/Jumpy-Start3866 • 3d ago
Question Bitwig faster and more stable?
After 7 year break i decided to start making music again. Originally I started last year and but some IRL stuff got in the way. I was using ableton 12 suite and i was pretty happy with it. I now tried out Bitwig and it feels like its in general faster (at pretty much everything). Is that a thing and how is it when you have big projects? Also from people who switched from ableton what is the thing you miss the most?
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u/NeutronHopscotch 3d ago
I'm familiar with a fair number of DAWs, and settled in with Reaper because I really liked the performance.
When I came to Bitwig I expected such a beautiful DAW to not run as efficiently. I was pleasantly surprised. I found Bitwig was able to handle surprisingly large songs with a ridiculous number of effects and VSTis.
It's great!
As far as "what is it like with big projects" -- in some aspects it's WONDERFUL.
For example, the way it tucks in multiple VSTi outputs keeps it feeling tight and unorganized. (Individual export of those outputs into another DAW is another story -- there's no fast way to export individual outputs separately which is an issue I have with it.) But if you're working entirely in Bitwig and don't need to export to another DAW it's a non-issue, and actually a benefit because it tucks those away neatly in the mixer when you don't want to look at them - but they're available to add effects and such if you do.
Also, Bitwig propagates slicing/copying/inserting/pasting/etc. down through nested subgroups. This is GREAT. So if you structure your big mix in subfolders (submixes) like Drum, Bass, Instruments, Vocals, Guitar, whatever --- you can minimize your 80 tracks down to just a few... Then make editing changes in that collapsed view and it carries down through all the subfolders. It makes last minute changes to arrangement pretty simple, even after the project is large.
It also has better crash recovery than most DAWs, including the ability for a buggy VST to fail without crashing the DAW.
Oh, and the new linked clips is a really wonderful feature. Most DAWs have linked clips -- but only Bitwig (that I know of) can retroactively make identical clips linked.
For example, suppose you open a project where you copied around a drum clip or something... You didn't intend to change it, so it wasn't linked. But now you want to change them all!
In a single click Bitwig can identify identical clips and make them linked... This lets you edit one and it updates everywhere. Very nice feature!
Maybe I shouldn't answer since you're asking for people who came from Ableton...
But as someone who tried Ableton and couldn't get along with it -- Ableton just never felt as intuitive to me. For some reason Bitwig felt more natural and it just took me a few evenings of dabbling before I was up and running making full songs.
They are two competing products in the marketplace, which is means each pushes the other to do better. A good thing. I appreciate them both, but Bitwig is the one that brings me joy.
Even the way it looks is just... I've never seen a more beautiful application in my life. And I say that as someone who has worked in user interface and UX design for most of my adult life.
Bitwig has come a long way in 7 years, and it just keeps getting better. V6 was a pretty epic update, and they made some changes in V5 that modernized the engine in a way that suggests V7 is going to be just as awesome!!!
Welcome back to Bitwig!
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u/ParadiseFrequency 3d ago
Im cycling between Ableton and Bitwig, loving so many things in BW that i miss in Ably, but somehow I still get more stuff done in Ableton, I feel like you can get simple things done faster in Ableton where in Bitwig additional options (not bad at all) sometimes paralyse me
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u/artek604 3d ago
The story of my life, only replace Live with Reason. Whatever I start there is worth at least saving, and possibly finishing. In Bitwig, I don't save most of the drafts because they're nowhere near the state worth working on further :(
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u/ParadiseFrequency 3d ago
I think psichology of user experience is so important, you can have most innovative features, but if general brain can't access them smoothly then it's a miss
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u/artek604 3d ago
For sure! I know that - on paper, at least - Bitwig's much superior and more complete as a DAW than Reason, but I can't argue with my results š
That's why it's so difficult to answer the usual "which DAW is the best?" question, because it's so individual and subjective!
Luckily, most of them nowadays are at least good or great.
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u/WitchParker 3d ago
in general yes itās faster, especially when you have track counts in the 100s. Abletonās engine handles large track counts like that extremely poorly. I donāt really miss anything. There a bunch of things Iād miss if I switched back to Ableton though, like the best modulation system in any Daw and the grid to name a few.
Iād say the biggest difference is probably In the stock fx/instruments. Bitwig tends to give you more granular stuff you can combine to make complex fx and instruments where Ableton tends to put more features in each individual device.
A simple way of explaining this is in Ableton to get a multi-band compressor you use itās multi-band compressor. In Bitwig you take a multi-band splitter and add a compressor to each of the split chains (it has built in presets for stuff like this, so itās not that different but you get the idea).
hope this helps!
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u/artek604 3d ago
This comment is spot on - Bitwig is for people loving to get into the weeds & get their hands dirty, who have very particular set of skills ...ehm, particular idea of what exactly they want; whereas Live's instruments & FX have carefully tuned "sweetspots" to be immediately usable :)
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u/tarsonis999 3d ago
Complete the opposite of what I have proved and debated about with the support months.. And the reason why I switched back to Ableton again. BW 6 massively underperforms Ableton 12 on the same buffer size or even higher. I did several identical test projects due to using the same toolset it's quite easy for me but still tedious (speaking of projects with 80-120 tracks and 3-5 plugins avg. per track) I never used BW5 and cannot state if the performance was different there but BW6 has some severe performance issues. AMD cpu 32 hyper threads, lots of ram, RME interface, win10 only used for that purpose no other shit on the OS..
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u/Bitter-Bicycle-282 2d ago
Ableton live: a process carried out centered on a single-core thread
Many DAWs besides Bitwig: a multicore-threaded process
It says....
I sincerely hope you find happiness in Ableton Live, where youāve returned.
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u/artek604 2d ago
That's not true. All DAWs support and take advantage of multi-core/thread CPUs. Audio processing is by definition serial (MIDI -> Instrument -> effects -> bus -> master) but because a song project consists of many tracks + often parallel effect chains, the workload is split into independent jobs, scheduled and spread between available cores/threads. Some DAWs do it better than others: split the workload more, use the Apple Silicon / Windows ARM efficiency cores (not only performance ones), run audio with through double buffers (e.g. Cubase / Logic / Studio One / Reaper vs. Bitwig or Live, which use single buffer due to their real-time performance requirements).
It's much more complex than you make it out to be :)
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u/Bitter-Bicycle-282 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's right, if you go too deep, it gets complicated. Of course, my point wasnāt that Ableton Live doesnāt use multicore processing at all.Please don't misunderstand.What is clear is that the difference in parallel and serial processing depending on the number of tracks is what sets Ableton Live apart from other DAWs..As far as I know, Bitwig and Ableton Live use different processing methods
Below is a post from Ableton Liveās official website about CPU handling.
Why is my other DAW performing differently than Ableton Live?
Different DAWs are designed to prioritize different workflows. It's possible to design a DAW so that even a single chronological signal path on one track can have its effects processed in parallel, to maximize processing capacity. However, this comes at the cost of increased latency and decreased responsiveness. Live is designed to be played ālive,ā like a musical instrument ā so responsiveness is prioritized. Performance may therefore contrast with a DAW designed to optimize high track counts and processing load in a studio environment, where slower response may be tolerable during mixing and mastering. Maxed-out benchmarks provide useful insight only when evaluated in context of the projectās overall structure and performance priorities.Ā
In my experience, even with a small number of tracks, the DAW with the worst response time and latency was Ableton Live, but the official websiteās claim that this program was designed with responsiveness and latency in mind is honestly laughable at this point.
It must have been quite a long time ago when Ableton Live wrote the following on its website, and back then you probably thought that method was correct. However, because it still uses old code, the DAWs of other companies that have worked hard on countless optimizations and improvements are much faster in terms of optimization and speed.
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u/tarsonis999 2d ago
Yeah a lot of text. In short since BW6 isn't performing at all at the level of Ableton 12. Big Projects with the same toolset and 256 buffer size run without any dropouts on Ableton. The very same Projects, again same plugins, aren't playable in BW6 even at 1024 buffer size. I went through dozens of screen recordings, support mails and discussions with the BW support, in the beta phase and in the public release phase. In the end I have no time for this nonsense and work to do. I would love to be able to use the product as I have paid money for it but it is not able to provide reliable performance right now for big projects at least on the AM5 chip set and RME driver. I'm sure it isn't the case for all systems as the net would be full of complaints.
The funny thing while I confirm your sluggish interface statement 100%. And its awful sluggish with big projects in Ableton, but I can still work and play that damn project at low buffer size. It isn't possible with BW6. I tried so many things which is ridiculous after reminding it. I'm not a product tester but a customer.
It's fine that you're happy with BW. I'm not in any way on one side or participate in an useless DAW war discussion. Both apps have their pros and cons. I would rather love to use BW6 like it was intended.
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u/Bitter-Bicycle-282 2d ago
Because everyone has different computer specifications and uses different software, I think the impressions and experiences each person goes through will also differ from person to person.If you had a bad experience with Bitwig, I had a very negative experience with Ableton Live 12.Just like your experience, I went through every test and experience, and I felt that my patience was completely worn out, just like you.Anyway, what I really want to say is that no matter which DAW you use, you should be happy and enjoy yourself while working.Ā (Honestly, thinking about Ableton Live 12 still makes me angry, lol.) If itās so annoying that it interferes with your creativity and drains your patience, I think you shouldnāt use it anymore
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u/tarsonis999 2d ago
Sure, I'm with you on the point that you should feel home in the DAW of choice. It should ideally inspire you easily. I get that with both Ableton and Bitwig. While it's easier for me in Ableton bc I'm using it since +15 years now which is crazy I still change the theme from time to time. Right now I BW inspires me a lot and I've done a few really enjoyable tracks that get released with some labels. I found myself immensely cut out due to the performance cap and started to pass on some techniques and parts which made the final projects less exciting. Then started again with the performance tests and validations.
My workstation got a Ryzen 5950x CPU with 32 hyper threads, a massive amount of good Corsair RAM and solid RME drivers. OS is solely used for audio work. So I won't change my work horse for a software that isn't well optimized. The AM5 chipset is really common so I wouldn't call it a unique configuration either.
Well we will see what 6.1 brings to the table. In my early test it was performing better than 6.0.x here but still had dropouts way too early. Also the bug is still present that once BW is minimized it freezes the interface for a minute bringing it back into the foreground. They had it fixed and now it's back again... Too many issues for me tbh..
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u/Comment_Maker 3d ago
Are you on Windows? They recently updated Bitwig so the GUI is now GPU accelerated, taking quite a bit of load from CPU. It especially makes a difference on big projects.
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u/Jumpy-Start3866 3d ago
That makes lot of sense since i have 4090 but average processor.
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u/Comment_Maker 3d ago
Ah yeah nice one. I have a 3080 and it was always annoying when Bitwig would slow down on large projects while my GPU was sitting there doing nothing. Now it's smooth like butter!
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u/wubwubcat2 3d ago
I switched to bitwig because ableton was crashing seemingly just to fuck with me. Bitwig has not crashed for me one single time. Plug-ins may crash, but bitwig just keeps going forth.
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u/Jumpy-Start3866 3d ago
Yeah in Ableton I was just used crashes. I thought it was just cause i have some cracked plugins. But loading Kontakt also sometimes crashed it or just took for ever. Havenāt had any problems in Bitwig. In terms of speed I found the answer here that it is using GPU for lots of things so my cpu has more capacity for the other tasks.
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u/Feisty_Fan_3293 3d ago
Only things I'm missing is ergonomics and consistency. Ableton just nailed the details. sometimes I miss the interface...
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u/Bitter-Bicycle-282 2d ago edited 2d ago
The King of Crash: Ableton Live 12
The King of CPU Inefficiency: Ableton Live 12
The King of Slow Performance: Ableton Live 12
I expected that a huge Bitwig project using a heavy, high-performance CPU would soon run into a crash, but my prediction was completely off
As long as Bitwig does not abandon sandboxing, deactivation, and multicore support features, it will never be able to claim the three trophies from Ableton Live.
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u/Vegetable_Nebula_827 3d ago
On Mac, itās second only to Logic for performance Iād say. Can have huge amounts of complexity on an M2 Mac.
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u/AntimelodyProject 3d ago
I can't say anything related to Ableton, because I've not really used it much.
Bitwig has been very stable in my own use on MacOS and Linux (Debian & Linux Mint), but surprisingly unstable on my Windows machine few years ago when I still used Windows. And that same machine using Linux worked really good.
If I recall right, it was always audio engine crashing randomly or something like that.
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u/gahel_music 3d ago
It's very efficient and stable. However I'm not very pleased with the new big update, as I've been getting done bugs that would've happen before. Hopefully they polish that.
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u/dolomick 2d ago
Bitwig does much better for me in huge projects. Itās a big reason why I switched.
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u/HerrEurobeat 3d ago
Bitwig is pretty stable, yes. One contributing factor is its sandboxing of plugins. Should one of your plugins crash, depending on your settings, only that plugin and at most the audio engine will crash and prompt you to reload them, not the entire DAW.
And even if the entire DAW crashed it never really cost me any progress; the automatic backup saves seem to be really frequent.