While owners of Ableton rest on their laurels with their multi-multi-multi creative DAW (digital audio workstation), which turns even the housewife into a DJ, musician and producer with a worldwide reputation, some of the sacked personnel has taken a source code and is trying to make money on this and win back a piece of the music market.
In January this year, some company named Bitwig announced imminent release to the market with products which are clearly not far away from its predecessor, both the visuals and functionality. It is almost complete reproduction of all Ableton-team's developments! For the "dust in the eyes" search engine was moved to the right and form of the "virtual" knobs was slightly altered...
So what's the catch which sly fellows from Bitwig use to attract potential buyers? First, they declared launch of Linux version (Ableton is not represented in this market). Second, in a future version they promise the appearance of their own modular system (add-on Max for Live (M4L) priced 249$ performs this function for Ableton nowadays). Third...
The third point for me is still open - the price issue. Theoretically, if the product will exist in the Linux-version, the price for it should not be high (because the active Linux-users are not used to paying for anything at all;)). On the other hand, the program is currently completely equipped, and fall in the price lower than other DAW does not make sense. At the moment the cost of Ableton Live 8 is £400, Cubase 6 is £508 (but do not forget that Ableton allows computer DJ-ing, but Cubase does not), Cakewalk Sonar X1 is £379, Motu Digital Performer 7 is £449, and only the last bastion of tracker-style-lovers Renoise 2 is worth €49 (all prices are taken from MusicRadar.com).
So we are waiting for the official release, and then maybe I'll take the final decision: whether to upgrade to 8 series of Ableton (they exhaust me with their promotional letters), or it will be cheaper to buy a new product and then get bogged down in experiments!
And another enemy of Ableton (Renoise) does not sleep!
SEE ALSO:
♠ Impulse Tracker Clone
♠ Unikum Main Page Favorite stuff of 30 year old guys: gifts, apps, thoughts, hobbies, music, art, nostalgia
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