For people like me, who live with some kind of visual impairment, colors are a fundamental part of the process that defines whether you will be able to use a software or not.
Currently I can use Bitwig but thanks to a lot of juggling with the accessibility features native to OSX.
Some examples:
To edit MIDI or audio (which has a light background), I need to invert the screen colors.
To use Phase-4 (or any other part of the DAW that uses the color red in fonts), I need to activate the use of gray scald colors.
With the grey scale active, I can’t tell when a modulation source is being used, so… more juggling.
To use The Grid I also need to make constant adjustments in order to see the cables.
In many ocasions I have to use high contrast mode to read text.
I won’t name them all because I believe the point is already established, but, in short: Accessibility is constantly left out by developers, which is perfectly understandable since the visually impaired are a very small slice of the market, however, for the few who make use of this type of feature, makes all the difference between being able to evenuse the DAW or not.
All that said, I still believe Bitwig is the most deliteful piece of music making I have ever used in a computer and I hope that my contribution here doesn’t sound like a complaint but like a real wish for grow. I’m 40 now, and I still have a hard time explaining what are the issues that impair my life, so it’s perfectly understandable that normal sighted people should be allowed to not understand them either.
Personally, I’m very inspired by the visuals and like to customize almost everything where possible. Moreover, I think this feature can attract a large audience of people who are just looking for fun. And there are a lot of those people.
How many people reading this actually wrote to bitwig ?
It seems to be the only way to make a difference
support at bitwig.com
I think the visually impairing point is really important and as @icaria36 said well enough it’s not like a theme force anyone to use them. And a default.theme is just there.
I’m gonna write to them because i have some low level impairment and i can’t imagine with people who have worst cases.
I know they are probably overworked but its one path forward to having way more consumers and more cash flow no ?
its probably even more important than many other more interesting features for a lot of people because its actually something tied to identity and identification with visual style, personal ‘branding’. Surely almost all the people i know who use dsableton have some variations of either one of the main 5 themes or some totally customs one.
The high amount of orange in the theme makes my bass sound thin and the drums lack proper transients and punch. Shifting the color tone to a different color will immediately lead to much punchier drums and better mixes. Shifting the color tone and having an option for purple text on green background is the reason i am missing proper eye cancer on my tracks and therefore this should be included so i can invert the colors of my mastering bus and have an overall shinier tone and brightness in my mix.
After seeing FL studio sorta botch the theme thing. I’d say spending resources on this is risky imo, at least for now. Arrangement, audio editing , and piano roll background color adjusting would be nice for night time. Because it is pretty white for this. Orange is actually ideal for improving sleep quality. For morning and day I enjoy the wakefulness and focus of the current look.
But yeah having a consistent look for a daw also helps identify the daw in tutorials and for support reasons, as soon as you get themes a small portion of people start using disgusting carnival level eye bleeding themes.
I even caught myself spending shit tons of time making themes. Doesn’t help productivity, it creates another distraction.
However I do understand that the more large area white that exist on the screen could be more damaging to you eyes and sleep in the long run. (due to white containing more blue) So reducing the brightness of the arrangement, audio-editing and piano roll could assist with this.
Having a dark arrangement background option basically. Maybe even a day night switcher for the arrangement part would be interesting to me.
Hi, I’d like to say that legitimately, I’d buy Bitwig except the colours look just really bad. I hope that the team can make the colours customisable, as Orange is a nightmare colour. I am sure many others agree.
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I created an account just to add to this. Please please implement this feature. I want to use Bitwig badly but I cannot switch to the most powerful yet worst looking DAW.
The colors, the skeuomorphed buttons. Bitwig badly needs a facelift.
Many of my peers have said “Bitwig seems great, but the UI is so ugly”
Whenever I see Bitwig’s rainbow bright and orange colour scheme, it is a turn off, and I feel many people have this initial perception too. It looks like a toy and is overstimulating.
There is real thing for many that when you get distracted by visual sensory overload, the perception of the music becomes a lot poorer. I have always found this and prefer the bland appearance of other DAWs because the lesser visual distraction allows me to concentrate on the music much better.
Though the use of colours to distinguish is useful, it is just far too over the top here and I firmly believe it affects the adoption rate of the DAW.
I wrote to the support years ago about this … it seems like noone cares at bitwig.
Some of the head devs either are very very sure that their color theme is THE ULTIMATE color theme, or they are in theyr minds making fun about people that also need some aesthetics when making music.
I mean the functions are there , why should colors change music right? thats so esoterik … but still its a thing at least to me …
But as i said it wont happen guys im sry <3
Unless we push this request to 1 000 000 … LETS GOOOOOO !!!
I would think that some cleanup on that default.theme file with inheritance (whatever the underlying framework allows) would already solve 90% of the issues for most.
Also, I don’t want major change, but the orange and 20-shades-of-grey looks just very dated and was something I used to run for terminal emulations ~10 years ago.
Strong yes-vote! It is not a frivolous extra, but a light and high contrast theme is critical to using Bitwig in bright environments.
Sunny days outdoors and in a garden room are my favorite places to write. Even with contrast set to max it is difficult to see what is on the screen in Bitwig in those conditions.
No issues with bright themes in other software, so this will drives me back to Ableton use
Not completely irrelevant to theming, but has anyone else come across Cirrhoz’s Bitwig Studio Refurbished article?
It’s an almost 2-year old post at this point, but since Bitwig’s UI hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10 years, it definitely points out some of Bitwig’s design inconsistencies (padding, choice of color and contrast, redundancies in UX and pointless contextual menus) and offers a beautiful UI/UX refreshment proposal, but without taking away Bitwig’s character and layout.
Of course being his first and only post, some very few redesigned features definitely need some tweaking, but I personally love 97% of what was presented in this blog post.
It was also posted on Reddit at the time and was met with extremely positive reception. It seems to have been forgotten about since then, so I just wanted to get the ball rolling again and give Cirrhoz the acknowledgment he deserves for his stellar work.
New possibilities for customizing the Bitwig UI. Not theming, not official, probably very limited possibilities depending on the OS… but something to hopefully bring the theming discussion to the next level.
This request is the 6th most popular here, just a few votes behind 
