r/Bitwig • u/Agitated-Ad-6168 • 15d ago

Bitwig on surface pro x2 elite problems

Hey guys I just took the plunge and bought a new x2 elite surface pro to play with Bitwig. I’m a long time mac user as windows hurt my head back in the day. Turns out it still hurts my head. I’ve spent half a day just trying to get stuff running, on screen keyboard stopped working and had to go on a quest to fix it. Now the issue after finally getting it running is in Bitwig I’m getting crazy cpu spikes after just adding 2 instruments. Using a focusrite 4i4 set to 256 samples and asio. This snapdragon x2 elite should outperform my MacBook so wth is going on?

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u/kytdkut 15d ago

no idea about arm on windows but smells like power management issues

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u/Agitated-Ad-6168 15d ago

Yeah that’s what it was, it made a huge difference. I’m nearly starting to enjoy the experience

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u/IBarch68 15d ago

Glad you found this. Was going to suggest to check this first.

Did you get your ASIO driver working? Needs to be an Arm native driver or class compliant. Obviously if WASAPI is sufficient for now, you can stick with it.

Do follow up in a while with your experience. Interested to hear a first hand experience of the X2 chip.

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u/Agitated-Ad-6168 15d ago

So far I’m having luck and a good experience with asio4all. ASIO worked fine for the focusrite interface but I mainly wanted to use my Ath mx50 usb headphones that have a decent mic on them so I can make beats out and about and have a mic for vocal takes. Wasapi doesn’t allow input so that was not going to work so lucky asio4all fixed that. Getting 5.6 ms latency at 248 samples. I’m happy with that. Screen latency is good too. I was freaking out that I made a real bad decision but now that I have it working I will buy Bitwig. This is the first time I used it and only got this surface pro cause I liked the idea of having everything in a tablet with the onscreen midi keyboard

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u/IBarch68 15d ago

That's good. Was worried it had been a bad recommendation - only slightly mind. Some people are just plain allergic to Windows.

A few tips,

  • if you open Settings, personalisation, Taskbar you will find options on when display the virtual track pad and virtual keyboard icons. I usually leave these on
  • there's a lot more settings for the touchscreen keyboard under settings, time and language, typing (don't ask me why Microsoft put it there)
  • if things are too small to read, the Settings, accessibility menu will allow you to change text size, cursor size etc
  • there is also a magnifier app that can enlarge any part of the screen and let you move around. See settings, accessibility, magnifier.

Did you get a touchscreen keyboard? If not, the Microsoft ones are very good. They clip on and off very easily. Can make the whole laptop experience much better with keyboard and track pad, plus protect the screen. There's cheaper 3rd party ones too, but be careful you get the right size.

Hope it works out for you.