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Logic $199 vs BitWig $399. I don’t get it?


Nunstummy

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I’m a 20+ year Logic guy, but BitWig is interesting, but $399 vs Logic $199 makes it tough to recommend. Whenever I consider a DAW other than Logic, Apple seems quick to release the ‘best of’ features to remain competitive. For example, live loops (vertical orientation) dominated by Ableton was soon added to Logic X and I think Logic’s live loops feature is now better than Ableton, while Ableton’s track mode (horizontal orientation) is inferior to Logic, ProTools and StudioOne. I hear that BitWig workflow efficiency is a good argument that’s compelling. But, are there features or capabilities in BitWig that Logic is missing?
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I'm not familiar with BitWig but I'm sure there are features or workflows that Logic doesn't have. However regarding the price point, Apple is in the business of selling hardware, so the software is just something to make you buy their hardware. Most of their software is free (MacOS, Pages, Numbers etc..) and some is low priced compared to its value, but once you become a Logic user, you become a lifelong Apple hardware customer.
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I'm not familiar with BitWig but I'm sure there are features or workflows that Logic doesn't have. However regarding the price point, Apple is in the business of selling hardware, so the software is just something to make you buy their hardware. Most of their software is free (MacOS, Pages, Numbers etc..) and some is low priced compared to its value, but once you become a Logic user, you become a lifelong Apple hardware customer.

 

True enough. According to Google, Ableton is #1 and Logic is #2 among DAWs but I’m not sure if this is based on sales or popularity or what. Surprisingly Bigwig is creeping up to #4. It’s amazing how Logic holds up, given it only runs on MacOS.

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  • 1 month later...

Just felt like adding this to a half-dead thread, answering the original question:

 

I have owned Bitwig for some years now, and it really is a TON of things you can do there that you can't do easily, or at all, in Logic. Not to say that it is better, it just has a very different focus area. Bitwig is more about easy incorporation of eurorack/CV outboard gear (there is built-in functionality to interact with CV, and they also made a hardware eurorack interface specifially for this), sound design etc than being predominantly a recording and mixing platform, if you could say so about Logic.

The whole concept behind Bitwig is that everything is modular, so, to put it simply, insted of giving you e.g. one crazy do-it-all behemoth synth like Alchemy, it just gives you lots of smaller components to build whatever ramshackle structure you want. If you want a synth with 50 lfos all modulating the pitch of a saw oscillator independently, and you want to modulate the rate of each of those 50 lfos with 3 lfos each, all running at different speeds (or whatever else you can think of, probably something better than that!), Bitwig is the place to go!

It also let's you use all of it's modulators with third party software, so you could easily add extra functionality to those (like more lfos, envelopes, random generators, you name it. Think of having an unlimited supply of MIDI FX in Logic), or build some kind of dream instrument with the oscillators from your favourite soft synth paired with the filters from e.g. FilterFreak or Volcano, all controlled by the same envelope, lfo or other modulator.

It also has the Poly Grid, which is in effect a Reaktor-style graphical modular system where you build what you want, it has the same for FX called FX Grid and, lately, also for modulators.

They have also incorporated some neat stuff like being able to put plugins that have a habit of crashing in their own environment, so if the plugin does crash, it only crashes the instance of the plugin and not the whole of Bitwig.

 

And Bitwig don't support AU, no, arguing they won't use resources on that since it's a cross-platform system, and AU is only for macOS.

 

That said, there is of course stuff Logic does way better than Bitwig. But I have made sounds in Bitwig I haven't been able to make anywhere else, so it definitely has it's own thing going.

 

I find it hard to really compare the two, as they excel at different areas of music making.

 

Price wise, I guess Logic is the odd one out on the DAW market, having a more than reasonable price.

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Price wise, I guess Logic is the odd one out on the DAW market, having a more than reasonable price.

While I agree on everything else you said, the price of Logic itself is not reasonable at all. No one can actually fund R&D and support of such a specialized niche product from 199.- or whatever peanuts the current price is, with free updates for nine years and counting.

 

As is publicly known, the actual price for Logic is the hardware dongle it runs on i.e. a Macintosh computer. This is very obvious as Apple quite strictly confines new Logic versions to run on new computers and/or new OS versions (which require new computers) only. While it can be argued that for roughly 3000.- every three years you get a top notch sequencer software package with an abundance of instruments and loops that is unmatched by any competitor, plus a powerful and modern computer on top, there's other, less obvious sides to this strategy:

 

There is no support from Apple, they rely on youtube and user fora like this one. Which actually works out well, to be fair, as 95% of questions can be answered by other users and I would rather have the guys code features than answer the phone to explain to a dude where the Play button is. But still, I wish there was a (paid if necessary) way to talk to a crew member in case there really is a leak in the hull. I'm aware of the Feedback form, and I'm repeatedly assured that these are indeed read, but that serves Apple and Apple only as the update that possibly fixes this bug, guess what, requires a new computer.

 

Since Logic costs virtually nothing and Apple sells magnitudes more iPhones than Macs, the Logic user base is not in a position to 'demand' features or, more importantly, bugfixes. Compare that to other companies where this is the main product, if they mess up a version, their wellbeing is directly affected by that so it's in their own best interest to get back on track, and quickly. Apple has pretty much zero dialogue with their user base, because they don't need to. Granted, it's difficult to talk to a greedy mob which is never satisfied and just wants more more more. But the users aren't that easy to please either.

 

Anyway. On with the show.

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I use my Macintosh® for a wide variety of purposes, not just music. (And I would say as an aside that I now own an original of the very first product that Apple ever sold ... no, it is not for sale.) The key strategy that the company has always used – after ditching a "clone-maker near miss" courtesy of a Pepsi-Cola guy – is that: "the software and the hardware are provided together. Period."

 

Microsoft Corporation is actually the only other "software-environment producing corporation" which did not maintain firm control over the hardware upon which their software was expected to run. (XXX - backspace - there was one more: the original "Android.")

 

In fact: Even from their "day one," their market proposition was: "no matter what hardware you have cooked up, we can supply a BASIC Interpreter (computer programming language ...) for it, whatever it is." Yes, even when their two founders flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico with a paper-tape in their pocket. They never "owned" the hardware then, and they've never owned it since.

 

Fast-forward to today: it could very-easily be argued that "a $600 product price differential" is in part made to absorb the overhead of supporting many unpredictable hardware environments, especially given that "hardware differences" can have a profound effect upon real-time software products such as these. All corporations must structure their costs in order to pass those costs on to the consumer, and the costs in this scenario are considerably higher.

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Hehe, I agree. I guess the wording could have been better on my part, easy to forget it's hard to convey any form of sarcasm with text.

 

Not so sarcastic, really. I find Macs last a long time. I had a 2014 15” MacBook Pro until last month, w 16gb ram/ 1TB ssd. That’s 8 years on the same laptop - I’d call that good value. Of course I’m not expecting my 16” MacBook M1 Max to last 8 years - we’ll see.

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