(See the first post on Live and Bitwig that introduces the topic!)

So while discussing the whole Ableton Live and Bitwig situation with my good friend Adam, an interesting thought emerged that I thought I’d share.

(Keep in mind that the below is pure speculation.)

Perhaps the real story on the relationship between the two companies / applications, and why Ableton has basically stayed silent since Bitwig was announced back in 2009, is that Live 9 is being built as an extendable, modular type of application (a platform?), which developers can extend with their own UI and workflow components. Bitwig Studio could be the first, ‘semi-internal’, example of this used by Ableton to showcase Live 9’s abilities.

This kind of architecture, which already exists to some extent with the Max4Live announcement, would allow 3rd party developers to provide customized or original Live scripts and user interface extensions, or just straight up new ‘versions’ tailored for a specific workflow or ‘application’. Kind of like a ‘Live for Live performers’, ‘Live for Mastering and Mixing’, ‘Live for Beat and Loop Making’ and so on.

If Live 9 contains an internal scripting engine it would also enable stuff like batch scripts to remove repetitive tasks or chained operations (additional automatic processing on a clip as soon as it’s recorded into?) that could be triggered by events in the DAW or via MIDI.

The Bitwig site talks about a ‘Native Modular System’:

Native modular system