Command Line support

Community Wishlist
1

Right now one can start bitwig-studio giving it one file to load. Even that is somewhat limited (e.g. it still shows the file-selector). Also one cannot load multiple-files.
Maybe it would make sense to add a proper cli consisting of <cmd> <–options> .

# load one or more files in all of the supported formats
load <file-1> <file-2> … <file-n>

# render to audio
render <file> –output-base=<path/to/basename> –formats=<wav,mp3,...> …  
# input bws, output file extension determines format dawproject, …
export <file> <output>

# input file extension determines format dawproject, …, output bws
import <file> <output>

# dump some metadata about the file
info <file> --format=<txt,json,yaml,...>

What problem(s) would this feature resolve?

Batch processing files.

How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?

During beta testers can render songs to compare them. Also after retouching some songs it is easier to rerender a song e.g. into mixdown and stems by a script with commands.

Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?

No

Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?

I don’t think so.

Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?

Unlikely.

Are there other products that offer this feature?

TBH: I don’t know.

Relevant links (optional)

1 Like
2

Would love this. The ability to batch render saves a lot of time for sound designers for games and other media, as well composers sending deliverables to sync libraries.

The ability to automatically name files based on clip name, track name, etc would be useful as well.

3

Another use case for command line would be to run bitwig headless, not only for offline rendering, but also for realtime stuff.
Bitwig through the command line already has a --headless flag and it seems it opens up a port to communicate with it. This is probably for testing purposes.
But, being able to control bitwig without running its gui would mean much less CPU usage and the ability to create custom and stripped-down interfaces focused on live performance