This morning before the alarm went off, I was dreaming that I was at a really dreary office party. A potluck where all the dishes had been made from AI-generated recipes.
I distinctly recall a bowl of green and yellow macaroni — no cheese or other sauce — which had the label “execute population all the time.”
The long-awaited Bitwig 6.0 was just announced today and is in beta. The features of interest to me consist of:
- nothing
This is their big update to clips and timelines, with MIDI piano roll features and automation editing improvements and a global key signature. People who are not me have been clamoring for this for a while. (And also clamoring for ARA and for MIDI comping, both of which are also of no use to me.)
I don’t begrudge other people their updates, and I agree with mdoudoroff when he writes “So far, I haven’t identified any that will make my life worse.” But hey, I can still say what I’d like to see in a future version of Bitwig:
- The ability to host plugins inside the Grid. You can do this with very awkward workarounds now, but it’s easier not to.
- A way to group objects in the Grid and turn them into a sort of “subgrid” or “black box” which can be abstracted out of the view, copied, saved for use in other patches, etc. Some of the mechanics for interaction/modulation are similar to what would be wanted for modulating plugins within the Grid, so I feel like these two go hand in hand.
- A way to toggle on visualization of otherwise invisible modulator assignments. If you point a modulator output at a knob or other control, it doesn’t create a “wire” in the Grid — and with some parameters this is the only option. That can make those relationships unclear when looking at your patch.
- Support for feedback in the Grid. Again, it’s possible to do this using some (slightly less terrible) workarounds with those invisible modulation assignments. It’d be lovely if it was just automatically supported.
Those would all be quality-of-life improvements for me, and the likely end result is that I would record entire projects in a single FX Grid instance which handles all the routing, mixing, effects, modulation etc. But like I said: it’s been fine so far without these things.
The hole in the sidewalk and street from the gas line hit back in April? A crew finally came to take care of it yesterday. Partially. They left off at about 11 AM yesterday with a hole in the street with a layer of asphalt not quite built up to surface level, and the big steel plate awkwardly placed right in front of our driveway entrance. Hopefully they’ll finish this up today.