Ableton VS Bitwig: CPU Stress test. Leaving Ableton after 2 weeks with Bitwig. 

Yup. They will probably not change too much because they are so comfortable and established

😂😅😂😅 Live lacks always inovation...

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE 22 years of code. I haven't used Live since v9; have they ever done a major code overhaul? >_>

Live is boring as hell @@sebbosebbo9794

Bitwig was written with much more modern coding techniques whereas Ableton is, well, old. It was a selling point of Bitwig from day one.

Next week we go over vocal tracking. Bitwig actually really shines here, up there with protools and logic. Ableton and Studio one are the worst.

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE ​​⁠ Brilliant, I generally use logic because of ARA for Melodyne with clients/friends. But sometimes Ableton when it’s my own projects (can freeze to get melodyne data, and I don't always love switching DAWs mid session). Am curious how bitwig compares. I’ll be playing with it over the weekend!

Thanks for the tips! Checking out the CPU icon now! Also, massive thanks for all the drivenbymoss work, absolutely amazing!

2) What costs are they? And who says it's optimized towards performing live? Then it would be something like MPC live, or Ableton's standalone push, but this is software right? This is a DAW, a complex daw to produce music. You talk like if it's a programme for making live music. I don't get these kinda "optimized for live sessions" stuff, so what happens if it supports live sessions? What are the drawbacks? Prove your statement. I'm curious.

@@FurkanTopalOK, let my try to rephrase: with towards "live" I mean "performing" where ever that is. On a stage or in your studio. This means the highest goal is to not interrupt the audio output in any way whatever the user does. Technology wise this requires some pre-cautions, normally the audio engine is separated from the user input queue and they communicate via an event queue (there is much more to it, this is just an example). Both Bitwig and Ableton are targetted to such a scenario and this is why they normally look a bit worse when performance (number of tracks and plugins) is compared to classic DAWs like e.g. Cubase, which are tweaked towards a high number of tracks/plugins in a mixing scenario. E.g. insert a plugin or add a track in Cubase when playback is active and see what happens.

@@mossgraber Thank you so much for giving your time and rephrasing but you said the same thing. I was hoping to hear something includes numbers, solid facts etc. I especially wonder "this is why they normally look a bit worse when performance..." part, because I don't think their performance is worse. Maybe the thing is, Cubase stayed as it is, but Ableton and Bitwig also added some revolutions to theirselves and surpassed traditional DAWs. Maybe that's why Pro Tools, Cubase etc users are decreasing day by day. I wondered this statement because I don't think I can take these DAWs are designed for live performance or targeted live performance. These are their extra features and I don't think they have any compensations. Still the tracks made in Ableton could slam the tracks made in Cubase. I'm an Ableton user, now this Bitwig seems appetizing and although I have Push 3 etc, I'm not a live performance guy at all. I'm just producing. I never use the session view in Ableton. Only arrangement view. Does this mean Ableton or Bitwig usually slower than Cubase in arrangement view? Or they open the VSTs slower than Cubase? PS: I used FL and Ableton only, never used Cubase before. Just trying to comprehend this statement and questioning if there's a reality.

@@FurkanTopal In the normal daily work these things do not really matter. And for sure you can get good results out of each of the DAWs on the market.

Try the Bitwig trial and let me know the results you get.

Took me waaaay by surprise! Just another reason

Actually I love the outdated 32bit cold tons of the best music software and plugin are 32bit. There was no reason to end support for these other than to sell new versions. Luckily you can buy software to still use them. And old logic is in many ways better than new but not all. Soon everything will be m series CPU only not because it's better but to force computer update sales.

" I always thought logic was for dorks" that's like an argument by a 13 year old

@@foljs5858 im just saying why I have no interest in logic and why bitwig caught my attention. It has the same vibe as a Hyundai. I’m sure it’s a great value for only $200

Well, until it’s old like the others 😂

Thanks for the support brother. Im in the same situation. all the others I collab with are on Ableton. what I've been doing is just importing a bounce of their session, then doing my ableton thing and sending back stems for them into Ableton.

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE that is what I am thinking in the back of my mind if I do go through with Bitwig. Always work arounds for sure! 🤘

Give the trial a shot. Would love to know if it out performs Ableton on your machine

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE I'm hooked!!!! everything seems to be ROCK SOLID! it just feels snappy and more stable to me. Using a software sequencer like Stepic to control my HW synth seems so straightforward since each track can do both MIDI and audio! My VSTs just worked, they are organized much more intuitively than Ableton. Don't get me wrong Ableton has cooler features but as far as Stability Bitwig is where it's at. For some reason, my CPU would spike to 20-25% for a second randomly in Ableton doing the simplest things, but not anymore.

what if I tell you that you can put a Reverb inside your Reverb. Or a chorus. Or a vocoder, or a resonator bank... Bitwig is like LEGOs with audio effects even before you get to The Grid XD

Glad I could help! Every now and then I go back to working and Ableton if a collaborator has a project but I end up quitting after about 30 or 40 minutes of using the browser because it just gets frustrating and the look is very uninspiring to me now. I have every single one of my devices in Bitwig custom mapped so I can fly through mixing and sound design just using the eight knobs on my controller.

Thank you kindly!

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE My pleasure ! 😀

I found it best with by Plugin, The individual was a bit more CPU but the By Plugin worked great

It’s been sooo smooth since I switched over

Oh ya. You will be fine

And i am using mac book pro m2 but with 8gb ram. Please suggest a way to configure a instrument setlist in bitwig

I would be curious if you opened the Ableton project inside of Bitwig and see how BW interprets it.

I suppose it depends on your exact instruments and computer setup. I just played a gig with 30 instruments loaded up in Bitwig (some of them layered in single tracks), including a bunch of different VST synth engines, some of the sample-based, linked to three different keyboards, using my LaunchControl XL to switch programs for my Novation 88 and KeyLab 67, and using my Novation 49 programmed to switch its own instruments. Worked brilliantly. I'm using a Macbook Air M1. I also had a couple of custom programs, and since Bitwig allows multiple sessions to be loaded in tabs, I just clicked the tab I wanted and then enabled audio for that session, then switched main to the main 30-instrument session. What computer are you using?

@@michaelsnowviolin thanks for your reply. I am using mac book pro M2 8gb ram and 512 gb ssd. If possible can you please make a video of how you are configuring 30 instruments and switching between each instrument and playing for live.

Don't know that I have time to make a video about this. I create tracks for each instrument or instrument layer, then set the input of each track to the keyboard I want to use. The LaunchControl lets me arm whatever tracks I want to have active for the particular song/piece. The KeyLab can do this in DAW mode; turn the big knob to go to the right track, then click the Record button in the Track Controls (even though you're not going to record). That's pretty much it. For my Novation 49, I use Bitwig midi-learn ("Map to Controller or Key . . .") to assign pads to turn on and off the instruments I want that keyboard to use (these tracks aren't armed; they have the monitor modes set to "Almost monitor input", and the pads activate and deactive the instrument VSTs).

Amp sims in Ableton or Bitwig

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE I'm using Bitwig!

Great tip! I’m going to try this!!

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE Another thing which I noticed in Bitwig, is that there is quite a high CPU spike just AFTER loading a new plug-in. This probably explains why you get clicks just after adding a new track, which then goes away again after playing for a bit. On heavy plugins this spike can last maybe for up to five seconds after the 'Loading plugins' bar is completed.

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE In your example, the 'By plug-in' might actually be better, as it will save some memory. Anyway, it's worth experimenting with the different options.

M1 Pro Max, 64gb ram

Thanks

Bitwig seems to triple the track count of Ableton. I ya pretty amazing

I just uploaded now, I was gonna keep it unlisted and just publish on Ableton forum but to show you I made it public, the video's name is "Why is Ableton like this?" Can you watch and give feedback about it?@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE

holy shit I just downloaded bitwig and dragged the files, it has read super fast!@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE

Trying to get hands on a copy of FL

I was impressed! Try the trial and test your system. Would love to know the results.

Great point!

Bounce in place or set less voices and voice stacking for native devices. You can also utilize tricks such as instead of having multiple tracks with same audio files (example choir effects), you simply route the audio to many tracks and change the delays. Grouping tracks and treating the bus with plugins instead of putting the same effects on each track. Lots of options really.

1# Avoid cpu intensive vst's

Thanks for the information.

but then your eyes and brain will hurt because of the UI and weird functionality for selecting clips that makes it such a pain for me. I don't think i'm the only one who just cannot bear to use it because of the way selecting works

I left a while ago and can’t imagine going back. I only use Live now when teaching and doing videos, all personal projects are 100% Bitwig

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE That's good to hear from someone doing serious work with it (so far I've only watched your "after 1 day" video and not the 1 week or 1 month one yet), given that I've just committed and taken advantage of their half price offer and bought a full Studio licence! I have seen some stuff about weaknesses of Bitwig which concerned me, but it seems all DAWs have something that makes for a bit of a pain point. So far I'm loving it and I'm happy to be supporting development of an "underdog" product and one apparently written in a very efficient and modern way (hearing about the complete separation of the audio engine and user interface code was particularly interesting to me).

Thanks for watching. I love Logic, actually track all the vocals in it. It will be featured in the next video.

Besides Logic, Reaper and Cubase are the most optimized

More to come. Loving it

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIRE can't wait...

HAHHAHA!, good choice!

I couldn’t stick with Ableton. After teaching it for 3 years at Icon Collective… fully in Bitwig now and can’t imagine going back.

Great to hear!

Agreed

Interesting results. Do you still get the visual lag in Ableton between the playhead and the sound? Drives me nuts

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIREyes same lag. It’s known issue in ableton. Ableton don’t latency compensate gui. I guess it’s cannot be fixed without rewriting code from ground up. And we all know it’s ain’t happening.

I tested too, same result: my Live-created set handled the load slightly better (occasional crackles) than Bitwig (extreme audio breakup) when opening the same set, so the behaviour shown in the vid in far from universal.

Thanks for supporting.

10ms throws you off when recording guitar? 10ms is the amount of time it takes sound to travel 3.5 meters or 11.5 feet. Do you also notice people's lips moving at a different time than you hear their voice if they're more than 11 feet away from you?

@@user-gx5qk5hm8s when it comes to sound synced to picture, 1 frame (approximately 33ms) is an obvious and audible delay which is noticeable by almost anyone when compared to audio which is actually in sync. I have often nudged sound effects and dialog in 1/4 frame increments (about 8ms) or get them to fall into proper looking sync. That said, I did double check and while 10ms wasn't noticeable when recording guitar, a 28ms round trip (512 samples in this case) was enough to throw off the timing for me. My apologies. There may have been other delays introduced into the signal chain such as plug-ins or I may have been looking at 10ms OUTPUT delay with a longer round trip delay which were causing me to remember being thrown off by 10ms setting. I should have done the math. 40ms, as mentioned in the original comment, would still be unacceptable for recording in my opinion.

They have something called the grid which is essentially an easier to use max for live. It allows you to build synthesizers or media effect or pretty much whatever you can imagine.

You fire

Just so I can test this, is the time drift with automation drawn in, in the automation lane. Or is it automation of a modulator going out of time as it progresses? How long until you start to notice the issue?

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIREwhy RU-vid deleted my comment? Hm… anyway. It’s an actual automation lane. Not sure if it happens with modulators. If you look up on forums about bitwig automation latency issue there are a lot of information and ways to reproduce it. If you use automation on plugin that have a lot of latency or use plugin with alot of latency after automated plugin you may be able to reproduce an issue. In a nutshell bitwig do not latency compensate automation.

Great to know. Hopefully I can ask them directly about this.

@@CREATEEDUCATEINSPIREyes. So basically what I did was just put one proq3 in linear phase mode. It introduced 1300ms of latency. Automated on off of lp filter and pressed play. Automation happening even before play head start to move. So automation happens instantly while play head latency compensate.

They do listen, yet they are German, and Germans tend do to things in a German way, it needs to do the job or else it won't make it to the diner plate, nevertheless they do listen even if it takes a few years longer ... but they keep innovating in their own way

Loving Bitwig

its hard to compare. My friend says the same thing when im complaining, but he generally has 30 or 40 tracks. I have sometimes 200 tracks with bussing, sends, premastering plugins etc etc. I do a similar session in bitwig and i still have room

@@shinyisshiny7780 True it is hard to compare, and I can't say anything about Bitwig in that sense, but in most cases Ableton works fine with a decent setup. For most cases almost any daw will work fine. Modern hardware is really a beast and still moving forward.

What are u saying? Laptops are NOT any slower than desktop pc:s. It depends components. My laptop is way more powerful than my relative new 16 core 7950x desktop with 128 gig ram with 3070 graphic card. My laptop is significant faster in terms of CPU and GPU speed and has more CPU cores and more RAM. You are buying laptops with weak hardware?

@@jussivalter Sorry, this is not true... Laptop components have limits in power usage and cooling and are in no way faster than desktop components. If your laptop is faster than your desktop you must be doing something horribly wrong in your desktop setup. If you want proof, look at all kinds of benchmark resources for different application types including stuff like cpubenchmark scores, there isn't any mobile cpu/chipset near the top of the benchmark results. I am not claiming a laptop is too slow to work on but for pure power you're better off on a non mobile platform. By the way, I don't have weak hardware laptop, it's a fairly normal M2 Macbook Pro with 32GB ram, it's not slow and works super fine for my daily job, developing, system maintenance and devops automation. But @ home I rather use my desktop as it's even faster, a lot.

Thanks for the tip!

Put on the Wig;)

У них разный язык программирования. Bitwig написан на Java а Ableton C++, язык C++ намного лучше

​​@@scmthhc++ is not "better". It is better for some and java for some things. Generally C++ code" runs faster" because it allows more direct access to hardware resources and has less overhead from automatic memory management. Additionally, C++ compiles directly to machine code, whereas Java uses a virtual machine, which can introduce additional execution delay. But this is only in perspective of how language itaelf works, it does not take account "how" bitwig and ableton is actually coded and what are those architechtures and architechtural design. It is allmost more important thing than what language is used.

@@jussivalter Понял, спасибо

nice joke :)