Bitwish is closing on Nov 2025 (unless we don't)

About Bitwish
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As the founder and sole active administrator and moderator of https://bitwish.top, I have decided to start closing down this project. Unless you stop me, where “you” are Bitwig lovers the community can trust that see a future for Bitwish and want to contribute to it sharing the moderation, administration, and hosting of this space.

On 5 November 2021 I set up this forum spontaneously as a place to crowdsource a community wishlist. I believe this objective has been accomplished on Community Wishlist. We can always vote more and bring more ideas, but the wishlist as such has been quite stable for a while. We have tried to extend the scope of Bitwish to include Bitwig Video Guide, Presets & Clips, Music, and General support and discussion but none of these other arteas has caught up.

Three months ago I shared a question / offer on IMPORTANT: Let's decide the future of Bitwish. It got some traction and interesting discussion, but after that spark we are more or less on the same place. To me, this is a clear community response.

I don’t mind to close Bitwish. I didn’t open it for me. I’m happy with Bitwig and their new releases. I was just frustrated to see so much community energy wasted in lengthy and sometimes even angry discussions that would be forgotten and repeated again. Now I’m satisfied that the Bitwig community and team have a reference, as biased as any wishlist will always be, but at least summing up the individual biases of hundreds of Bitwig users collaborating with ideas, discussions, and votes.

It’s been a while that my interest in continuing Bitwish wasn’t based on the community wishlist but on the possibility to have a modern and fully-featured, open, and open source forum to build a community of support and collaboration around it. But the Bitwig team keeps staying away from community building (which I respect and in their place maybe I would do the same), the Discord community seems happy in that private space, the KVR community also seems happy in that aged platform, and the Reddit community etc etc. Everyone is voting with their feet (fingers), and the result is clear: Bitwish isn’t seen as an alternative to the active and populated Bitwig community spaces.

So let’s act consequently and shut this space down:

  • 7 Nov 2024: IMPORTANT: Let's decide the future of Bitwish
  • 9 Feb 2025: Bitwish is closing on 5 Nov 2025 (unless we don’t)
  • May 2025: Closing account creation and publication of new topics.
  • August 2025: Site frozen, no more posts.
  • November 2025: Website pulled offline and backup safely stored.

Do you have better ideas? Do you want to get involved? I’m all ears. It’s not too late to turn this space into an active community, if this is what this community wants.

And a screenshot with a diff of the first Bitwish edit just to illuistrate this post.

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I can understand your perspective and respect the path. Although I have not been so active here, a public wishlist was and still is a good idea I think. Maybe the list can be moved to a GitHub repository and continue living there. For a community building it is difficult to compete with other platforms, where you have X communities that might interest you at hand to easily switch or browse. Time is rare and things need to be efficient in one place for most people I guess.

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Hello,
i want to say: Thank you for having done this awesome project. To me, it had the right mindset from the beginning. it’s the lack of community and Bitwig-engagement which is unfortunate. But these unfortunate things aside, the currently visible community wishlist IS of great value, because it shows to others how many other people already formulated their own wish. So it’s helpful for the community to have some metrics which are outside of Bitwigs zero-transparency policy, and it’s helpful for the community to have the idea-hub in general, with well-formulated feature-points which make sense.
This is why i have to ask you: Why do you want to take it offline completely?
I currently have 3 websites myself, which cost me 40 Euros a year. I’m not sure about your personal provider-contract, but a bad hosting mode which is sufficient to host just one single list shouldn’t cost more, right? I’d suggest to keep bitwish.top alive as a “as is” representation of the current community wishlist. Not as some backup somewhere locally, but online, visible. Without forum, ofc. But with a big fat donation button somewhere where there’s a doomsday counter to the next payment at which the site has to completely shut down because there are nt enough donations :wink:

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I agree. I’d donate myself just to keep this alive, I think I’ve already stated that it doesn’t matter as much for me if this place is not that active, this is not social media after all. it has a different purpose and lack of activity can say that there’s already a lot of ideas formulated, we just have to wait for big releases to see where things going, hopefully mark some major requests as completed and see if anything new becomes relevant.

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Thanks so much for everything you’ve done for the community! It has been a while since I was here myself, and I’m sure it’s similar for many others, but I’ve always loved the place and the vibe.

For what it’s worth, the Bitwig community is still active over on Discord, in the Polarity comments and his Discord, over on Mastodon too, and in the Tâches Teaches initiatives. So many great people!

Thanks again!

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While I love your work and the importance of trying to get our voices heard by the bitwig team, I cannot help but feel that they are deliberately ignoring the community.

They are not engaging with the community, they make very unpopular design/business decisions and they give no indication that they want either of these things to change.

We all have great ideas of what could be done with bitwig but ultimately, the bitwig team doesn’t care.

If I was you, I’d send them an email asking if they care about this community wishlist and if they don’t, archive and close it.

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Thank you for the feedback. If you have more to share, keep it coming, please. We all will figure this out.

You seem to agree on the idea that a community wishlist doesn’t need activity to be useful as long as it’s there when someone wants to contribute to it or update it. It’s a fair point.

By the absence of comments, you also seem to agree that the rest isn’t as important and it’s ok to close it. In a scenario where this Discourse forum lives beyond November 25, I would keep the link with Presets & Clips because @Bitwiggers put a lot of work on it and it works by itself no matter how few comments about presets land here.

Other scenarios mentioned refer to Bitwig’s Discord (see @ensonic’s comment there) and to GitHub. A read-only alternative that already exists is Archive.org (see the last snapshot of the community wishlist).

About keeping this Discourse forum, the key is community work and governance. If I’m the only active user with special permissions, then governance is simple (just me) and I have shared my personal decision above. :slight_smile: If you have better ideas, step in as an active moderator, the logical next step. Admins and moderators welcome is a bit outdated but still serves its purpose. Anyone interested in becoming a moderator or administrator, please check that topic, and comment there. I’m more than happy to share the governance of Bitwish (and hence the decisions about its future) with others.

Full disclaimer: the only “ideological” bias that might prevent me to share the keys with someone else is to avoid that Bitwish is weaponized against the Bitwig team, their releases, and their approach to community management. I’m convinced that Bitwish has got this far because, collectively, we have avoided this temptation.

Oh, and it’s really not about the money. Bitwish costs $12 USD / month for the hosting and $3,60 USD / month for the daily backups.

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But they did give indication that they’re working on some popular demands for next release.
Yes they don’t engage with community much, that’s their decision that’s based on some unfruitful attempts in past. Even so, it’s not like they don’t observe the community, they’re present in Discord and they know about this website, so I think it’s up to us to make it a place that matters.

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What is “some popular demands”? I only know of the ultra-vague piano roll announcement - something so often demanded across all social media channels for so many years that the only surprise here is that it took them so long to get the hint. It’s hard to say whether bitwish played a role in this.

In which way are they present in the discord? I cannot join, so I wouldn’t know.

To me, the fact of the matter is that they did have an actual employee engage on the KVR forums but then pulled him/her and it’s been dead silence in public community relations ever since. Unfortunately. But that’s also why I wonder whether bitwish actually can have any real impact - it’s not possible to confirm unless bitwig says that it does.

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many things from most voted requests on bitwish that can fit in this description:

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We’ll have to wait and see. ‘Fundamental’ improvements mean they’re digging deep, it takes a lot of considerations for future-proofing the changes they make, as well as making everything backwards-compatible. So they could’ve been at work on this for years as well.

Some of the devs are on the server, but they rarely talk there.

Do we really need their confirmation though? It’s made for us primarily, and it can be of convenience for Bitwig.

When it comes to main theme of this forum - it’s a place where we, users, can arrive at some consensus for certain feature requests, confirm what we want and how we want it. Then it’s also on us to use it, give them link to relevant topic when doing usual formal feature request. Perhaps this part wasn’t clear for some people, that each one of us actually do need to email developers as usual about the feature request we’re voting for, it would just help to include a link to a topic for reference, so we can all be on same page.

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This has been a super helpful tool for me and has helped calm my mental activity and provide hope… Thanks for taking the time, money and care to make this happen for the Bitwig community.

I love the discourse forum

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Bitwig still does not have an official forum space. Discord is too clunky for that type of thing IMO with their server. So, I think, if anything, a separate discussion forum would be great.

Is it time, or funds? What is the hosting cost on this?

I have since moved on/back to my original DAW Cubase, and use Bitwig on occasion. With it supporting DAWProject, and Steinberg working close with them now, were starting to see some overlap. They are both Germany based companies, so it makes sense.

One of my last massive wishes is to have Bitwig as a plugin. Like FL Studio, Reason Rack, Maschine. Bitwig still has a lot of great devices and it would be great to get those into great sequencers/DAWs.

So, I say, turn it into a regular community forum.

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there are already some forum categories beside wishlist related ones, the problem was general inactivity. but I don’t know if it can be called a problem really. people are just too much used to modern social media, and when they seek for a forum-like community, most people only know about KVR. so in some sense Bitwish is just not that well known.

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See my comment above:

It’s not about the amount of time either. For me, it’s a matter of mental focus and not having things lingering around. It’s like synths and controllers, some people enjoy collecting them; I keep only what it’s being used. :slight_smile:

For most people Bitwish has been a site that was there when they needed it. For me in the past years it has been a place where I felt quite alone. So you end up thinking, what’s the point. I hope this makes sense.

About General discussion, I keep wondering what is cause and what is consequence. If those of us who want to see here general Bitwig discussion and community support answering questions from Bitwig users… if we would start posting here, would more people come? Would we reach a critical mass of regular activity? Bitwish has today 1159 registered users, from which 20 joined in the past 30 days. Sure, the vast majority aren’t following and won’t participate, and many maybe don’t use Bitwig anymore or moved on from hobby music production. Still, when you see activity in KVR or Discord we are talking about… what, 50 regular users? Plus other coming in and out with questions, specific topics or moments of peak activity i.e. new Bitwig beta releases.

I’m happy to start posting my own questions and other Bitwig-related topics here, if I know that at least a couple more people will follow and respond. Posting on a forum and getting no response doesn’t feel good, but as a founder-admin you don’t know how frustrating this can be. :slight_smile:

There is also Music. There isn’t a good place to share music made with Bitwig and get feedback. A place that feels like community when you post tracks, get feedback, give feedback to others…

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You’d be surprised though, that this place is always on the mind for people who know about it. Many people know about it, but just don’t have reason to constantly check on it. And it ties in with your question:

Maybe? Beside KVR, this is the only proper forum-like place for Bitwig so far. It’s just depends on what topics we discuss, what would attract people to be regulars here.

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For instance: A vocal chain using Bitwig native devices in 2025

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Don’t.
I’m here.
Soon Wiggy will be here too :grin:
I can post regularly so you don’t feel alone.
I’m pretty sure that when I’ll ever try installing it again, I’ll have daily waves of wishes.

Anyway, your life your priorities, if you’re busy you’re busy, but this website will need time to become a point of reference like similar things for Ableton.
Ok, tbh I’ve no idea if in KVR they have a section for wishes. If so, maybe people are used to that one and it’s more lazy for them to have all together in one place.

I don’t like KVR, horrible UI, here is better.

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well, if people from Bitwig liked it, they wouldn’t pull out from moderating sub-forum there. so even less likely that they’ll use it as reference for what users want. with Bitwish they can use it as reference, because of the way it’s organised, just they don’t have to agree with everything on it, but at least it’s readable.

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Its because this uses discourse platform. Steinberg and I think NI use it too. Great little forum thing.

Anyway…as long as I get email reminders, I will check things out on occasion. Were all on thise massive rock thing floating/flying through the galaxy together at 140 miles per second. By the time I finished writing this, we flew about …

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