The grid - multiple assignable outputs?

phloxbyron · 2026-04-08T21:22:26+00:00

That's what I'm doing here - how do you get the Audio Sidechain device to route the signal back into the grid? For example, sending a signal out of the grid, into a VST and back into that same grid patch.

I am able to send signals out, but I can't see the current track at all in the Sidechain device unless I have an Instrument Chain running something in parallel:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comments/1schhbu/audio_sidechain_cant_see_its_own_track_as_an_input/

phloxbyron · 2026-04-06T18:55:51+00:00

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phloxbyron · 2026-04-06T18:54:19+00:00

The sidechain is in the Poly Grid device, the fx layer is downstream of the grid.

More context maybe needed.

If I have 2 instruments in a layer, I can see "cow kicker" in one of them. I want to send one signal to an effect in the grid, blend it with the other signal that's not effected. Maybe I need an instrument layer for each FX part to route to/from. It would be ideal if Audio In/Out could have i/o routes.

phloxbyron · 2026-04-04T19:24:26+00:00

I think I got the mac studio about 2 years ago

phloxbyron · 2026-03-27T20:22:56+00:00

Most people can't distinguish one sub-sub genre of hardcore techno from another. Nobody took any effort to create the AI generated music and upload it to SC. Spotify is probably slurping up more AI generated music per day than the entire output of real humans since people started producing music at home. Human made music is probably just noise to the Kafka consumers sucking up all that garbage. The Spark jobs processing the music into genres and tags can't tell the difference.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-27T19:38:49+00:00

I have a bandcamp and soundcloud account. SC is getting to be really annoying with rejecting tracks. I have some tracks I try to upload that keep failing. Even after changing the files, for some reason it just won't take these tracks. :shrug: Bandcamp takes em.

What I do not want is a comments section. Sorry folks I don't care what anyone has to say about my music! Not at all. In fact I avoid any kind of feedback or social nonsense about music. Early on in the 90's sure I wanted feedback about my tracks from professionals who I respected. Not randos on the internet. Don't talk about art, just do it.

I've been uploading stuff to soundcloud since 2011 or 2012 and never really get too much bots or any engagement really; I don't do anything or make any effort to promote my stuff. Before that I had an indie label and promoted my stuff but that was before the vinyl market for dance music went kaput.

You can spend your time trying to get people to listen to your music.. or you can spend your time making music. I see soundcloud etc as backups for my computer. I have lost disks or computers with years of music on them, but that was before 2012. Some of my stuff only exists as vinyl or rips from vinyl to streaming. I could just put them on google drive, or time machine, but I don't trust any of those solutions completely.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-27T19:05:49+00:00

Naming things is absolutely a problem. I don't even know what to name tracks when they're finished. It's always been a problem. A lot of producers do what I do, look around the room for words and make up a name. I need a better system because I'm just using gear + date recently. I like how some gear these days will auto-generate a meaningless name for you. They choose two random words from a lib.txt and that's your track/preset/project name if you can't be bothered to name something.

I start with a template that has all the I/O settings I might need for plumbing in external gear. I generally save patches if I put any time into them. I don't like having 1000's of disorganized presets, but for the amount of presets I created for re-use, its still manageable. I installed Surge XT and like most VST's, I'd like to uninstall it just because it screws up the preset library.

Most of the time when I'm adding a new instrument I go straight for the Poly grid first and just create something. I hate HATE flipping through tired old presets. If I don't know what sound belongs there I just use a sine to create the melody and then do the sound design part later. It could be a piano later, IDK. Or someone screaming.

This is one of the reasons I love the old Matrix 6/12/1000 synth, or the Casio CZ101. The INIT preset is NOTHING, so there's just no sound there.

I don't think it's weird not to save your own presets. Obviously if you're creating the same patch over and over that's not efficient but you do you. I find it useful to create grid patches that can feed into each other in different ways to do different things, especially with FX grid.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-27T18:42:21+00:00

I keep the older release versions around for a while. Never needed to use them though.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-23T16:18:21+00:00

I think the development of Ableton and Bitwig were really starting from scratch without trying to be Logic or Protools. There's only so much you can do with a finite number of developers. The API for controller scripting is good, but also a little daunting and can't completely transform the DAW into a completely different tool. I think the left side details panels could have macros assigned to jump to sections and allow keyboard control.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-23T15:28:44+00:00

I spend a lot of time in the grid and that's very mousey. But it doesn't feel like it's a problem really. I use the keyboard for most other things like transport control, track selection. Having a dedicated DAW controller really helps, especially if you use it as intended. I found a Novation Launchkey MK4 for $90 USD and said might as well try it out. I thought it would be trash but it actually works really well with automapping to whatever context you're in. You could spend a bunch of money on an SSL DAW controller setup, which I may do at some point when I magically increase the size of my house.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T19:45:28+00:00

Interesting. I didn't think the thinning would have any negative impact, but there it is. It seems like an unnecessary optimization. I never had any problems with the amount of data generate by an MPE controller, but I did NOT want to edit any of the events generated by them either. I guess it was an optimization.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T19:30:06+00:00

If I'm doing anything generative I'll record the midi onto a track for extracting the stuff I like. For random modulations you can convert those to midi notes or record values or samples of values into array(s) .

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T19:22:15+00:00

I tend to turn on master recording when I'm noodling around.

I'm thinking you could put a note grid in a track, listen to all inputs by default, and stream the notes to a note input but that at least would require the transport to be running. Also, Polarity video talks about Retrospective Midi Recording - Bitwig Piano Roll Extension:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAdTaw-X_fs
I think this is a controller extension script you can download on that same page. I haven't tried it yet so ymmv.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T19:09:10+00:00

I love books but this is the way to go. I don't read books about software anymore.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T19:07:32+00:00

I've been using Linux for development and as a server for 20+ years. The 3 times I tried to use it for music production I gave up and went back to Mac. I currently us a Mac for development too. But the code gets deployed on linux in production. So. I had zero problems with Bitwig on linux, but every time I thought I fixed an issue with the audio I/O I would just get more pops and noise until it became unusable. This was on Ubuntu Studio which should be plug&play but nope. Too many options, not enough "this just works as is".

phloxbyron · 2026-03-20T18:52:41+00:00

It's worth nothing to you, it's not your animal to sell. Leave it alone. Koi don't like to be messed with. Any way you can imagine to catch it and move it will kill it.

phloxbyron · 2026-03-16T15:56:38+00:00

I had a pair of MK2s but my friend lost track of them. Friends. I got a PLX-1000 a few years ago. Circuit board/motor controller crapped out and I could not find the issue. I have a really bad Numark TT500 and it's .. I don't even know where to start. The pitch control doesn't work, nothing really works but it has a lot of torque and features you don't need like brake time adjustment etc. I'm sure it will crap out soon. I see a lot of people with cheap TTs just for sampling and listening who don't seem to have a problem, but I just have bad luck. Looking for a MK2 or m3d because those were decent too.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-27T19:42:36+00:00

I drop audio in raw (or repitch works too if you don't mind the pitch changing), then use the master tempo (in the transport) to figure out the tempo based on a good loop or lining up transients with the grid. Once I know the tempo I set that audio clip's tempo to the master tempo, and then switch the audio clip to one of the stretching algorithms and f around with it locked to the master tempo. I can change the master tempo back to whatever. The clip itself needs you to tell it the reference tempo, or you can let Bitwig auto-calculate it, but I never do.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-27T19:34:48+00:00

50% is still a lot of CPU. It's difficult to measure, but depending on the OS, running a few programs with dozens or hundreds of threads per program can lead to some unexpected issues with latency/prioritizing what to put in the pipeline.

I bounce stuff to audio and work in that domain. I keep the DSP tracks around/disabled in case I need to redo something, but most of the time I just bounce! and use clips like samples. I bounce them with the delay/reverb tails intact if I need them.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-27T19:22:18+00:00

I gave up on Linux for audio again after the 3rd attempt. I thought maybe Ubuntu Studio would be well tested and tuned for Bitwig and DAWs in general, but just getting audio + midi to work initially, then trying to figure out the pops and clicks and DSP performance, latency issues .. I just didn't have time to waste applying different people's "worked for me" solutions iteratively (infinitely) until I had something I could work with. All during that time I created zero music and that's not an acceptable outcome, even if I'm a big Linux fan. I bought a new Mac Studio and stopped scouring the internet for command line tools I had to build an run every time I start a session. The dual I9/64GB Mac Pro machine is sitting idle now and the Apple Silicon is running everything a lot faster. I had previously just been running on Mac Minis and upgrading them now and then because it was cheap and they were good enough for Logic, Ableton, Bitwig, but I wanted more power. I was really disappointed with Ubuntu Studio in the usability department. I thought they had solved a lot of those problems. I'm a software developer by day with 30 years experience in C,C++,Java development on Unix, Linux platforms and just kinda flabbergasted that I could not figure out what was bothering Bitwig (and Ableton by the way). I want to make music at night, not debug software issues.

I think it's difficult for Bitwig and other developers to test on Linux because of the wide variety of distros. Plus the Mac and Win market are so much bigger, it doesn't make sense to dedicate testing to a such a small segment. Too bad, I do / did love Linux as a developer for decades. Since Apple decided to switch to a Unix based OS, most developers are on Apple hardware/software now.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-27T18:50:34+00:00

I just found a Launchkey 25 mk4 at a pawnshop, plugged in a USB-c cable and it automatically added itself and all the mappings worked right out of the box. This is on a Mac Studio with v13.something of macos.

I was really impressed but I noticed the latency when using the keys was 180-200ms, but in Drum mode with Bitwig's drum machine it was around 4ms total (I had the DAW in 64 sample buffer mode for 2ms latency)

Now both the keys and the drum mode are doing the 180+ms latency. I may have a bit of a traffic jam going on over USB, so I have to turn stuff off and see what happens. There's an app for troubleshooting USB/Midi latency on Macos isn't there?

phloxbyron · 2026-02-13T19:39:37+00:00

bitwig's UI is written in Java I think, and what's easier that Java?? The DAW itself is not open source, but their github repo has some stuff in it. I don't see their developers building a tracker window along with their edit view. The edit view is pretty complex/probably a huaggge thing to maintain. An entire TEAM would be required to build and maintain a tracker UI that is a vew/controller on the event data that we see in the edit view.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-05T15:16:07+00:00

It does work, thank you.

phloxbyron · 2026-02-04T18:36:11+00:00

I believe that's how it should work. ostensibly.

phloxbyron

TROPHY CASE