External Audio editor support like seen in other DAWS. I won’t switch from Ableton without External Audio Editor support. I use iZotope RX on most things that I want to sound really good, for extra polish. Mostly good for de-clicking and vocal treatment. Or sound design things.
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
Use iZotope RX for cleaning up clicks / artifacts / or editing frequency based content in the spectrogram. (This won’t make sense unless you have RX probably)
Zero cross snapping slicing
Denoising, de-verbing, or using any other frequency based algorithm in RX.
Bitwig has good “regular” audio editing but not pro grade spectral clean up and manipulation found in RX. You can select frequency content using photoshop like tools and apply effects to just that content. I feel like I’m a salesman for RX but there are other uses for external audio editors to augment the abilities and shortcomings of bitwig.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
Reveal the file in explorer right click it and edit? I’m not sure if this takes the sample offline though or if the whole project needs to be reloaded?
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?
Ableton, FL studio, Reaper, literally almost everything else.
In case it helps, there was a recent comment from @Tj_Shredder in another discussion:
Well, that is independent of the editor you use. In your case I would first clean up the material in an editor and then move it into Bitwig, or use Bitwig as editor and use the plugin versions…
RX connect in my opinion is not good. You have to insert the VST just to be able to transfer it to RX. As opposed to in ableton I just click the external editor button on a sample and it is in RX just like that. Same with FL and other daws.
Immediate vs Load vst on the mixer channel where the sample lives. And try to transfer the sample by playing it I think it was? (It’s been a long time since this idea came out. I haven’t tried it since RX 4 ish.)
The sample doesn’t just transfer you have to play the segment if I remember right. Imagine if your sample is long. It is a multistep process and it feels as wonky as it sounds. Sort of like recording audio into melodyne but worse.
I’m actually not sure if RX connect itself was abandoned. I haven’t heard about it for ages (For good reason). Especially since iZotope seem to be exploring ARA support but have only done so in Logic.
I’m waiting for ARA support as well, hopefully we’ll see it in version 6 of Bitwig. I need to use RePitch and VocAlign so I can fully transition from Studio One
I doubt this request will be super popular but it’s probably because people don’t usually sound design as heavy as I do. But to be more clear about what RX allows me to do.
This is what I mean by spectral selection, you can select frequency content within an audio sample. Within this selection I can apply RX algorithms, vst effects, or other magic to that selection. You can’t select spectral content in bitwig. Not even with RX vst effects plugins.
