Some instruments are recorded with multiple mics/signals. For example a multi-miced drumset, a electric bass with a miced cabinet and a direct out from the amp, or perhaps even a whole choir with several mics.
As soon as you have more than one channel per instrument, you can’t use Bitwig’s current comping feature in a practical way.
Even though for recording a whole band in a studio, you might rather use a DAW like Pro Tools or Cubase, a solo musician might still want to record some drums or bass in their home studio. And someone who uses Bitwig in their solo project might also play in a band and professional recording studios are expensive. Bitwig doesn’t have to turn into Pro Tools, but some features to record a band won’t hurt.
Since you would process those signals in a different way, you would still need full individual audio tracks and not just multiple channels per audio track. I already saw a thread about multi-channel tracks for spatial audio. So that feature would be similar but still different.
I think for this use case, being able to do comping with the new meta clips in group tracks might be a good solution.
What problem(s) would this feature resolve?
With a recordig from a drumset for example, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to individually pick the best parts for just the kick, snare, low/mid/high tom, and so on, when some other signals bleed into that mic. It all has to be comped as one synchronised unit. You would have to do the comping with the overheads first and then manually copy what you did there to all the other clips from the same recording.
How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?
Comping is already a feature in Bitwig. It would just make that feature work better (or work at all) with instruments that have multiple signals that all need different processing.
Bitwig also wants to be non-destructive. So it wouldn’t fit Bitwig’s pilosophy if you route all the signals into seperate audio tracks where you do the mixing, group those tracks, and then record the output of that group into a single clip, where you then do the comping. That way, the mixing would be destructive and you can’t change it at a later point.
Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?
While writing this post, I realized that as long as you only have two signals and both signals are mono, which is the case with an electric bass, you could just setup one signal as the left channel and one as the right channel, and then use a stereo split container to individually process those signals. But that’s A, only a workaround with the workflow you would expect from a workaround, and B, it won’t work as soon as you have three signals or more.
Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?
I don’t know enough about Bitwigs API, but it might be possible to write an extension that copies the comping you made in one clip to other clips. But for that to work, you definitely need a signal that contains all of the instrument, if you actually want to know what you’re doing while comping.
Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?
Not without completely replacing Bitwig’s native comping feature, which wouldn’t be reasonable.
Are there other products that offer this feature?
I have no idea. I never used other DAWs than FL Studio, Ableton, and Bitwig.
Relevant links (optional)
Why use multiuple mics with a drumset: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XlLbjV2qomc
Why use a miced bass cabinet and alos the direct out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OSLtMnHNNk