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I decided to switch from Ableton Live 9 to Bitwig mainly because of Bitwig's superior 64 bit plugin functionality. Ableton Live 9 still has very mediocre 64 bit plugin support. If you have both 32 bit and 64 bit VSTs, then with Live you have to purchase a separate 3rd party product called 'JBridge' in order for Live 64 bit to see your 32 bit plugins. This is already outrageous considering how expensive Live is from the start, and they expect you to buy a product from a 3rd party just to get it to work? What is worse is that JBridge only works some of the time. It makes 64 bit stub files from your 32 bit VSTs but Live doesn't always see these stub files. So when you use Live 64 bit you have to give up a random selection of your 32 bit plugins. But what was really the final straw for me was that the jbridge would randomly crash. I would work on a project for an hour or two and then poof! Jbridge pops up an error and Live crashes. Once Live crashes it leaves a live.exe zombie process in the task manager which you absolutely cannot kill manually. You either have to reboot the entire computer or wait about 10 or 15 minutes for the process to finally die. During this time you can't start another instance of Live and just keep working, you have to wait. There's no reason for it to keep a death grip on your system while it's finishing crashing, no other DAW is like that. When other DAWs crash you can restart them and keep going within a minute or two. But Live's death grip crashing means whatever creative groove you had before it crashes is lost. It is an incredible productivity killer. Bitwig on the other hand has native 64 bit and 32 bit VST plugin support in one process and no need to convert with jbridge. It also has options to run the VSTs as separate processes and does a fantastic job of insulating the DAW from glitches in the VSTs. This means it is ROCK SOLID and you're not going to be kicked out of the DAW for 10 or 15 minutes at a time waiting for Live to finish crashing out. I've emailed Ableton about the death grip problem and they have never replied. I've been with Live since version 4 and it was great for a while but it's clear that they're past the phase of new innovation and are now just collecting checks without developing much new functionality or even fixing ancient bugs. There's no reason for shoddy 64 bit support, if you're running even one memory intensive VST like a realistic drum or piano sample plugin that has many gigabytes of data, you NEED 64 bit support. By that measure, Live is no longer really a professional solution, it's only good for less demanding tasks. They've made themselves obsolete. Bitwig also natively has support for LFOs to modulate any parameter you want. Live only has that as a $100 upgrade if you buy Max. Bitwig also has a lot of other cool signal routing features that Live lacks, but that is just icing on the cake for me. With Bitwig I can finally just work and get stuff done. It's much cheaper and all around far better than Live. Get it!

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It is intimidating adopting a V.1 software when so many of Bitwigs competitors have had plenty of time to mature. That being said, I am enjoying the workflow, the built in instrument and effects sound fantastic, and I am really looking forward to the future, when the instruments and effects will go semi-modular (like Reaktor).

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Amazing, where can I start? Bounce in place, efficient workflow, modular environment, VST 32 and 64 bit support, easy automation, AMAZING AUDIO EDITING, VST sandboxing (if a plugin crashes the entire project doesn't go down). For a V1 DAW i must say it is top notch, it can only get better in my own opinon. Absolutly worth it.

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