After some reading of their FAQ (at bitwig.com) it appears that ReWire support isn’t planned for Bitwig.
And that means I won’t be able to use this software with Renoise, and so my interest in Bitwig suddenly went down the drain.
As in “real or not, I don’t care anymore”. Especially not if the price is around $499 or something of that order.
I also don’t like the “tone” of the Bitwigs. They act as if they had something revolutionary going on, while it seems to me that Bitwig Studio is basically a copy-paste clone of Live. There is another company that seems to adopt a similar “tone”, and that’s the company behind Reason. Whenever PH releases something, they make it look like they have radically changed the game for the the entire music industry. I can’t stand the kind of BS marketing they pour out these days.
Speculation is one thing, but I haven’t seen this much projected fantasy (both favorable and vitriol) since the OP-1 was about to be released.
What’s with the conspiracy theory theories? 1) it’s ableton live 9 in disguise 2) it’s vaporware
Re: 1 : Does anyone realize how much it would cost ableton to put on a hoax like this, nevermind the risky alienation of their userbase. Corporations don’t work like that.
Re: 2 : a little more reasonable, but if they’ve gotten the implementation to the point they have in the demo and sunk the effort into marketing vids, I doubt they’re going to spontaneously abandon it. The more reasonable explanation is that the downside of a buggy release far outweighs a few months of crazy users theorizing about a hoax.
They haven’t announced a price. Why are people making decisions about whether they’ll buy it based on the price they imagine it will be? Re: marketing hyperbole - yeah it may be a turnoff, especially with this crowd since trackers like to be iconoclasts, but it’s not like Propellerheads have suffered for their marketing tactics. It’s also not really fair to be like, “your marketing may be good for your sales but you shouldn’t use it, in spite of already taking a big financial risk to make this thing in the first place…” At the end of the day, I’ll judge the product for what it is when it comes out.
Are you suggesting that PH was making a good sales with their Record marketing BS? “Recording done right”? I think it’s obvious that they misjudged the market completely. Then the pay-what-you-want deal for upgrading Reason into version 6… that move was in response to the massive complaints from loyal Reason users who obviously didn’t want to reach for their wallets. So what are they thinking today? The few RE plugins that are available right now at their shop would cost over $1000 to buy, if you wanted to get them all. So who are these customers? Not the bedroom producers’ wallets that Reason 1.0 was aiming for… I’ve been a Reason user since it first came out, and I think after Reason 4.0 the Propellerheads started to flirt too much with the hiphop crowd in US, and that pretty much showed in their marketing videos.
That the Bitwigs are saying explicit that they’re not planning to support ReWire (an industry standard) is pretty disappointing. But yeah, I agree the product should be evaluated properly, when and if it’s available to evaluate (anybody had a beta invitation? seems like nobody on the planet can even confirm they have, although Bitwig studio is currently in beta testing…)
You make a damn good point about nobody being able to say they’re actually testing Bitwig; I’d not realised until reading your post, but you’re right. I’ve just tweeted about that fact, hoping that someone will actually get back with confirmation. Seems a bit odd; (dare I say suspicious?) - I can’t believe there’d be an NDA in place considering they’ve not been shy about making it known the beta has begun… Maybe an NDA about talking about details/bugs in the beta, but not stopping you from just saying that you had an invite.
imo PH expanding their audience was probably the smartest thing they ever did (at least from a business perspective). The beatmaker and rock crowd dwarf the idm/techno early adopters who were on board for reason 1.0, probably by several orders of magnitude. Given that, I think adding Record (and accompanying marketing campaign) makes perfect sense … even if it’s the opposite of what the typical renoise-er would like to see. There are tons of non-technical people in that crowd for whom reason is all they need and as a result, reason is maybe on par with protools in terms of brand name recognition now. This isn’t to say that you or I have to like the direction they’ve taken - just that it makes sense business-wise.
Re: lack of bitwig beta testers - I thought this was weird too. But I think them being behind schedule and announcing a beta that probably only consists of their employees and their moms is more plausible than a conspiracy to trick the interwebs.
There was a web page, that showed the price… I took a screen shot, incase it was removed… I don’t know if the page still exists
I removed my post… cause A. Who knows if this is correct. B. I’m a little embarrassed to still be struggling a bit in the economy.
Whatever… I’m still learning all the stuff I have been able to afford. I kinda need rewire. And if there was something very expensive and nice to have, IMO its Cubase… or Nuendo, although that’s a little silly, it would be nice…
I don’t see why anyone would buy bitwig unless it was considerably cheaper than Live. I believe it will be rolled out with price in the 80 euro range, and if they don’t they are idiots and will sell only 15 copies.
Why would anyone buy an obviously inferior live clone with the same price as live. Sure it has some neat features live don’t, but it also lacks many other features that live does have. The time might change all that, but it’s still younger project, and can’t really compete with a veteran like Ableton.
We are very happy to announce that Bitwig Studio will be released on March 26th, 2014!
We’re attending the NAMM show in Anaheim, CA this week, where we’re showing Bitwig Studio in action together with the Nektar Panorama P4, Livid Instruments Base Controller, and the Novation Launchpad. If you happen to be at NAMM, please visit us at booth 5000, Hall C!
Check out the full press release here.
Pricing and availability
As of March 26, 2014, Bitwig Studio will be available both from selected stores worldwide as boxed version, as well as online at www.bitwig.com as download. There will also be a demo version of Bitwig Studio available at the release so that everyone can try it out firsthand!
Box: USD 399.99 / 329 EUR
Download: USD 399 / 299 EUR
Further news on pricing in other territories and currencies will be available closer to the release.
live standard is 350 euro ( live suite 600 but hey that also gives you max/msp )
But live has an amazing compressor ( cytomic glue etc…) I don’t know about the quality of the bitwig effetcs …a you tube demo showed the parameters of the effetcs are modulatable at audio rate …big plus http://www.youtube.c…h?v=BspO9Dimp14
@ 5:50 …altough I am not sure if the actual audio signal is used as modulation , or just as an envelope follower …
Did people really think that bitwig would be around 100 euro ?
Yep, that was pretty much what I expected. You have to find a sweetspot for the price. If it is too low, you won’t earn enough from all the licenses. If it is too high, people will be more tempted to use pirated versions and again you will not earn enough from the sold licences. Besides, if you make professional software, there is probably more money to make from support contracts, then from selling the software itself.
Well, I doubt that professional recording studios are THE target user group for Bitwig.
Moreover, I suppose that todays typical DAW mass market consists of smaller studios and single artists / persons.
Of course, there is a small percentage of highly specialized DAW software with tight hardware integration like Sadie, and so on.
That sort of stuff one can find in studios of TV/radio broadcasters. Those products have professional support, for sure.
But that’s a totally different league.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the people behind Bitwig will earn their money primarily by selling licenses, not with support.
ableton 1.0 released in 2002 http://www.soundonso…les/ableton.asp
219 bp …rouhly 270 euros …no midi , no vst … etc…and of course the inflation …but still
Don’t forget bitwig has put a lot of work in this , no fundraising whatsoever …
