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It amazes me how fast this product is developing compared to all the competition. Their architecture must be far more flexible than Ableton, who's 9 -> 10 upgr
by teilo 8y ago
It amazes me how fast this product is developing compared to all the competition.
Their architecture must be far more flexible than Ableton, who's 9 -> 10 upgrade was seriously underwhelming for the five years they had to work on it. Nested groups, multi-track editing, and capture are all welcome, so I'm not discounting what they DID add, but for the life of me I can't understand why here is still: No MPE, no VST3, no inline VST MIDI effects (you still have to use multi-track hacks), no comping, no global time signature changes, and the same stunted MIDI/Audio routing system.
The Grid has Max4Live directly in its crosshairs. It is obviously not a direct replacement — yet, but it covers 90% of the way most people use Max, without the need to dive into the guts of Max signal processing, and with far superior DAW integration.
My prediction is that this is a prelude to Bitwig releasing a module designer app, with full access to the DSP components that underly the existing built-in synths and modulation system, that will bring this thing home.
- mrbrowning 8y agoI don’t remember where I saw it, so it could be apocryphal, but I saw an admission from an Ableton developer that the difficulty in implementing MPE support is down to the fact that MIDI implementation details are baked into a bunch of disparate components across levels of abstraction within Live, which seems pretty plausible to me. I don’t envy the effort involved in rectifying that, but it does have me looking at Bitwig more and more.
- teilo 8y agoOh I have no doubt that's the case. Ableton, remember, began its life as a clip launcher. I have no doubt that its architecture has been built up over so many generations that moving forward in any significant way would require a massive compatibility-breaking re-write. That's why all the changes for the last few versions have been mostly extra effects/instruments and workflow improvements. It also explains why the new Max integration does little more than improve its launch time. Bitwig has had the advantage of a greenfield redesign based on lessons learned by former Ableton devs. Their choice to implement the audio engine in portable C with proper process isolation and a Java UI is a brilliant move. It is so refreshing to have Bitwig's audio engine crash, and be able to choose to start it again or save my project without losing a thing.
- ab5tract 8y agoI have to disagree with this idea of fast pace. Considering they have had to perform two full audio engine rewrites since they launched 1.0, and didn’t even have MIDI channels (while claiming to be next level MPE... no hardware works in MPE mode without those channels!). They switched to a yearly subscription to allow “more updates more quickly” but then drop to one major release per year. Sure, they are doing a pretty impressive job. But I think they are lacking in the foresight department, otherwise they wouldn’t have needed to rewrite everything a couple times already since launch.