Instant MIDI retakes and take-lane comping for Bitwig Studio — by iuri.io

Bitwig has comping for audio, but nothing equivalent for MIDI. Flub a take and you stop, delete, re-arm and start over by hand — a workflow gap the community has been asking about since 2021. TakeLab closes it as a controller extension, 100% inside Bitwig, no companion app.

Alpha — this is the first public version. Expect bugs and rough edges; improvements and bug reports are very welcome (see Status & contributing).

• Double-tap retake — recording and messed up? Tap play/stop twice, fast. TakeLab discards the take, rewinds to where it started and records again. Works in the Arranger and in the Clip Launcher.
• MIDI comping with take lanes — loop-record a passage; every loop pass lands on its own track, arm rotates automatically, only the active lane is audible. Audition lanes one at a time without soloing away the rest of your song. Controlled from Bitwig's Studio I/O panel.
• Always record — persistent record mode: the arranger record toggle stays armed through stops, clicks and edits — press play and you are recording, always. Disarming record by hand pauses it, arming resumes; Bitwig's default Toggle Record shortcut (F9), or R if you rebind it, becomes a one-key pause/resume switch (see manual §7).
• Late undo — missed the tap window? Three quick taps discard the last take, no mouse needed. (Off by default.)
• Keep takes (Launcher) — instead of discarding, park each take in the slot and re-record into the next empty slot below.
• MIDI footswitch trigger — one pedal press = stop + retake, hands never leave the instrument.

• Bitwig Studio 6.x
• To build from source: JDK 21 and Maven

Grab TakeLab.bwextension from the releases page and drop it into:

Then in Bitwig: Settings → Controllers → Add Controller → iuri.io and pick:

• TakeLab — the default. Declares no MIDI ports, activates immediately.
• TakeLab + MIDI Trigger — only if you want the footswitch/pad trigger; requires assigning the MIDI input (Bitwig refuses to activate a controller with unassigned declared ports).

You should see the popup "TakeLab loaded".

1. Arm an instrument track, hit record, play.
2. Messed up? Tap spacebar twice (within 400 ms). Notes are discarded, the playhead jumps back, recording restarts — your count-in settings apply.
3. Happy? Stop with a single tap.

TakeLab can't see your keyboard (Bitwig's API has no keyboard access), so the gesture is inferred from the transport: stopped while recording, then playing again inside the tap window. Anything that stops/starts the transport counts — spacebar, controller button, mouse.

One-time setup: an instrument track plus 3–8 empty note tracks ("lanes") with their note output routed to the instrument track — every lane plays the same sound. Then:

1. Set the arranger loop over the passage — the loop selection is the take region.
2. Record-arm all lanes.
3. Studio I/O panel (right edge) → MIDI Comping → Start.
4. Play. Each loop pass records to the next lane automatically; you always hear only the lane you're playing. Past the last lane it cycles back and replaces (never overdubs).
5. Stop — or just stop the transport; either way every arm/mute/overdub/loop state is restored.
6. Audition next lane cycles which lane is audible (mute-based — the rest of your song keeps playing). Unmute all clears everything.

Full walkthrough with screenshots-level detail: docs/MANUAL.md.

Studio I/O panel (per-project, the stuff you touch while working):

Controller Preferences (one-time setup & calibration): tap window (150–1000 ms), re-record suppression, minimum take length, MIDI trigger mapping (note/CC + channel), engine step delay, launch-quantization bypass, notifications. Every setting is documented in the manual.

• Bitwig's Controller API cannot enumerate or delete arranger clips, so the arranger retake discards via a single undo — which is why an accidental retake is always one Ctrl+Z away from recovery.
• Launcher slots are fully scriptable, so there the clip is deleted (one named undo step) and the slot re-records — and keep-takes mode exists only there.
• The API has no computer-keyboard access and no way to register shortcuts, so gestures are inferred from transport state, and the panel buttons live in the Studio I/O panel (DocumentState).
• Actions are queued by the audio engine; TakeLab sequences stop → undo → rewind → record with a configurable delay (default 100 ms).

git clone https://github.com/iuri1911/takelab.git
cd takelab
mvn package   # needs JDK 21; deploys straight into your Bitwig Extensions folder

Bitwig hot-reloads the extension on every build.

• Tracks/scenes beyond a 32×32 window are not monitored.
• Simultaneous arranger + launcher recording can't be retaken (undo would swallow both); TakeLab warns and does nothing.
• Cutting the best fragments between lanes into a final comp is manual — the API can't move notes across arranger clips.

TakeLab is in alpha: it works — early users are recording and comping with it — but expect bugs, rough edges and fast iteration. Improvements are welcome and PRs even more so. House rules: everything in English; behavior changes must update both this README and docs/MANUAL.md.

Found a bug, have an idea, or just want to talk? Open an issue or write to ribeiro@iuri.io.

MIT — © iuri.io