IMPORTANT: Let's decide the future of Bitwish

About Bitwish
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Hi! I’m the founder and sole maintainer of bitwish.top. I’m happy about what we have achieved until now, and at the same time I think it’s time to decide what happens next with this project.

Bitwish is now 3 years old. In this time we have achieved a community wishlist of Features based on the votes of +1100 users. However, things are very quiet, which makes sense after the list becomes mature. If you ask me, Bitwish won’t go beyond 4 years as it is now. Either it finds a better purpose, other admins, or I’ll freeze it. I’m starting a 12 month countdown.

As a community wishlist, whatever Bitwish could achieve has been achieved.

As an open and public community forum based on the open source discourse.org platform, I still think it could have a use for the Bitwig community. Much better software than KVR, and more public and better searchable than Discord. The thing is, despite the +1100 users registered there is no active community.

So I have a question / offer:

If you think that there is a place for a Discourse-based forum in the Bitwig community, I’m happy to contribute my part of work to evolve Bitwish in the direction that makes more sense to you, and remain as an admin and maintainer as needed. Other admins are welcome too.

If you don’t see the point for any Discourse-based forum in the Bitwig community, that’s fine, and I will set some kind of deprecation notice + a call to admins just in case someone wants to take over before I close it in November 2025.

If you want to consider the idea and discuss it further, we have time. I’m not in a rush for changes and Bitwish can stay as is with its slow pace of new accounts, votes, and comments. If you have any feedback or questions, just post them below.

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Dear Icaria, thanks for maintaining the site, I love it and it is awesome, but I guess just as you said, probably the most important features are catalogued und thus there is no big activity. I’m kind of guilty myself. For me it is also hard to say, if Bitwig listens to the community and if the effort is worth it. It would be so cool to get feedback from them.

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I like the website as a catalog for feature requests but I’ve never really thought of it as a forum or anything. I check in now and then to see some opinions on the state of bitwig and features being added, as well as finding potential workarounds for long requested features that have not been added. I.E. Rewind/Midi Cap for retro record and the theme tool for editing Bitwig’s theme. As you mentioned it’s probably just less active because most of the important features to people have already been mentioned here. Bitwig hasn’t released a major update recently either which slows engagement.

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I think a Discourse based forum dedicated to Bitwig that covers production techniques using native devices/the grid, theming, and the topics usually discussed in the Discord. Maybe think about getting a different domain (bitwig.social maybe) and expand the topics?

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+1. The domain could stay the same, actually, but it would be clearer to use another one. In any case, the current wishlist content should be a section of a wider forum IMO.

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Even if forums are rather inactive now, there’s a lot of potential in it, and already a lot of resources and structure in place. I don’t think it really needs to constantly boil with discussions either, it’s good to have a resource with good condensation of useful info as opposed to most forums, even if it results in more rare posting.

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I greatly appreciate what you’re trying to do here and I think it deserves to exist. There are a lot of people like me out there who are dissatisfied where bitwig development is going and the only real ways we can show this is by either harassing their support about it or showing our support on this platform. Numbers matter.
If you were to take this platform down, there’d be no place to organize this type of wish list anymore, which I would find a great loss.

At the same time though, one has to be realistic. If bitwig keeps completely and utterly ignoring the community as it has been for the past years, there’s no real point to even try to influence their management. They’re not listening, don’t give any kind of feedback and there’s 0% engagement with the community.

If their DAW hadn’t been the first modern DAW on linux, I’d have dumped it already.

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Thank you very much to the first commenters and I hope feedback keeps coming.

Turning this space into a public Bitwig community forum is technically easy. The question is whether there is enough interest or need, but we can try and see what happens.

Yes, the current Wishlist would still have its own category.

We could also keep a category for presets, evolving what is currently Bitwiggers.com. We could keep the automatic connection to Bitwiggers and expand the scope to any presets hosted anywhere.

Should we reopen Music? Should we reopen the Bitwig Video Guide? To be discussed.

What other categories would you like to have?

About the name/domain… I believe that such a big change should be reflected in the name. One logical option would be to propose to the https://bitwig.community maintainers something like forum.bitwig.community.

That would also put the forum closer to Bitwig’s Discord. Publicly searchable forums and highly responsive chatrooms complement each other very well.

What do you think?

(((About the Bitwig team listening or not, participating here or not… let’s not dwell more into this discussion. They have made clear that they watch this space just like many others, but don’t plan to participate directly, just as they don’t participate in other channels. With the team size and budget they have, I would probably do the same – and this is why as a volunteer I want to help improving Bitwig community spaces.)))

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5 posts were split to a new topic: I thought this was an official Bitwig run forum

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I have started making changes to turn this space into a community forum for anything related to Bitwig. For details, see Bitwish project log 2024 - #13 by icaria36.

What do you think?

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Maybe you are able to turn this into a plugin library or something. My Bitwig wishes are mostly fullfilled as of now.

I still wish to have a 90° turned midi keyboard / top down - edit view in bitwig.

But ok… we can not have everything, I guess. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Right now it is a plugin “library” limited to Bitwiggers.com but we can aggregate more repositories if there is an automatic way to do it (RSS or otherwise).

I have started to check new entries under Presets & Clips and test them out out of curiosity. I encourage others to do the same, and to :heart: / comment the ones that catch your attention.

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Video Guide seems to be still open though? Unless it’s restricted for most users and not me. Either way I see no reason to lock those categories. Video Guide especially is a handy resource that will only get better as more videos get posted to corresponding categories. Although Bitwig itself already have a good interactive help for devices/modulators/modules, having videos that can showcase non-obvious use cases it still a good thing to have.

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Yes, Bitwig Video Guide and subcategories are open to replies on existing topics. Only admins can create new topics. This makes sense for Devices Instruments Modulators and Grid Modules given that the elements in these categories are defined by the Bitwig Studio software. I’ll open Basic Concepts and Production so anyone can create new topics, since the topics there are more debateable.

Ok, let’s keep the video guide. I need to create topics for the components released in the past couple of years…

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About Music, I was thinking that we could offer one topic per artist/group, i.e. “Music by icaria36”, and then the user can post anything they want and whenever they want as long as its theirs and Bitwig is part of it. What do you think?

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Thanks for keeping the site alive. I hope bitwig lurks from time to time on the wishlist. I send them ideas too often right away. I post go though my ideas list and post them here. That allows to get other peoples input and might also provide more signal to bitwig.

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I’ve been a long time FL user and loved the forum over there. As I love to create patches and diving deep into sounddesign, i spend houers doing that. To have a platform to share (Bitwiggers) and discuss (Bitwish) these projects is amazing.

I do see potential in this regard especially since Bitwig offers so much possibilities with creating your own presets.

Thank you, and I’ll absolutely have a look at other presets. :slight_smile:

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