NAMM 2014: FINALLY A NEW DAW ON THE BLOCK?
By Graeme Hague
27 January 2014
Can you believe we first started talking about the imminent arrival of Bitwig Studio in June 2012? Bitwig was (and perhaps still is) going to be a game-changing new DAW with a strong focus on live performance applications – and thus was being touted as software that might give Ableton’s Live something to worry about. Here we are in January 2014 and Bitwig has demoed its software at NAMM, released a long video in which a rather nervous chap called Dom gives us a Bitwig Studio run-down, and finally a definite launch date of March 26th has been announced. If you haven’t been keeping tags on the Bitwig saga, from what can be seen Bitwig Studio is very much an electronic/EDM music creation DAW and won’t come near the likes of established studio bedrocks such as Protools, Cubase and the rest. In fact, there’s no mention of recording wave files at all – it’s all instrument-based sequencing. Included in the first version of Bitwig Studio will be 50 “devices”, a term which covers virtual instruments, plug-ins and effects. It’s been priced at US$399 for the download version –not as cheap as some folks speculated it might be in an attempt to usurp Live 9’s throne. Bitwig Studio has a staff of ten. It’s a small company attempting a very big task. Wish them luck at www.bitwig.com
Australian Distributor: Innovative Music www.innovativemusic.com.au
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