Bitwig Studio would auto-save the active project at regular times. Ideally, the interval could be specified by the user. As a result, there would be always a back-up of any work done.
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
Currently Bitwig stores a number of backups, but only when the user manually saves the project. In case of a crash or something unexpected in the system, Bitwig has a recovery function, but it is not reliable and it doesn’t save all the project information.
The fact is that sometimes users lose work, and this could be prevented with an auto-save function that is pretty frequent in software applications for creative work.
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
This is functionality that is common to many types of software, not just DAWs.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
Manual saving and auto-back-ups.
Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?
No.
Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?
No
Are there other products that offer this feature?
Pro Tools allows you to specify the interval and the number of saves to keep. Despite Avid referring to the function as Auto Backup, it is more of an auto-save.
Bitwig’s recovery feature is most reliable I’ve seen across any DAW. It’s so reliable, that I often shut down Bitwig via task manager if I have several projects open, because it can take time to inspect what I need to save and what I don’t. Then I just make sure I run same Bitwig version next time and get all my projects recovered to exactly where I left them.
So in that sense Bitwig already doing ‘auto-saving’, it keeps cache of current projects down to last action, which is better than regular saves, the only thing to improve here is to have this cache persist and be accessible by user if they choose not to recover projects when launching Bitwig next time, and also so that it doesn’t get cleared if different version is used next time, which will not give option to recover projects, as well as clearing the cache (presumably), so the correct version of Bitwig also won’t prompt to recover projects anymore. This indeed needs fixing, I’ve run into this few times during beta test, when hopping between beta and stable.
as I’ve mentioned above, Bitwig does this in less archaic manner, but I suppose if you’re forgetful and may want to roll back to a state some hours ago, and undo doesn’t go as far, then yes, such option can be useful as well.
Recovery version, yes in theory but sometimes I have got nasty surprises. I have Bitwig set to open with the last project used, and a couple of times I have got the last project open AND a recovery version offered, and when I have chosen the recovery version it wasn’t the last, and I fear that the already open version would have been more recent.
I know it makes little sense, but it has happened. In those situations it is hard to debug and reproduce, so I don’t know what’s the pattern if there is any. @x.iso you might be right that it is related with beta time (which takes a significant portion of time). I will pay more attention to this next time.
Bottom line, since they already have a way to record changes on the go, it would be very nice to have a setting to do a proper save every N minutes or not, which could run in parallel with the recovery version (no need to touch that, accidents might still happen).
In my case, an autosave function would solve the 90% of problems when I had to rely on a recovery version. Sometimes I forget to close Bitwig, then I close the PC, and that’s when next time I will be offered the recovery version.
