Fabio Neves / NO STEP

Bitwig is running mighty fine on Linux so I'm seriously considering using it instead of Ableton to play on stage. I always need to adapt my tracks for live situations anyway, so it's not a lot of additional work. Also:

1) My mac is old and heavy.
2) My everyday laptop is a very decent and light PC.
3) I really tried, but Windows still kinda sucks for audio.
4) Audio on Linux is surprisingly stable, performant and flexible, if you don't mind spending some time getting it to work.

May 10, 2017 at 4:33pmWeb
Show threadFabio Neves / NO STEPMay 10, 2017
The only downside is there's no official VST plugin support from commercial developers (yet?). On the other hand there are plenty of exellent free plugins, and Bitwig's built-in effects and instruments are good enough. I never use heavy plugins on stage anyway (you're asking for a crash if you do), so I think I can live with it. Let's see how it goes.
Show thread⛈️ Information ⛈️May 10, 2017

@fabio I had heard win10's new audio stack was ahead of literally everyone else in terms of latency. Certainly they advertised this.

Is it a case of the "good" software for this being too expensive?

Show threadFabio Neves / NO STEPMay 10, 2017

@Elucidating In my tests Win10 is under-performing both macOS El Capitan and Linux with the same software (Bitwig).

Bitwig isn't free, and Ableton is considered a good (and yes, expensive) software, so it's definifetly an OS problem.

It might be because of ASIO drivers, since no pro-audio app on Windows uses their native audio driver architecture. This is both for technical and historical reasons.

Sadly, macOS is the only system with good pro-quality audio out of the box.

Show thread⛈️ Information ⛈️May 10, 2017

@fabio Sad to see the performance hasn't migrated into the consumer sphere.

I knew some folks who did a demo for maker faire that actually had to use Win10, but they coded it from scratch.