I am new to BB. I am on Mac. I finished my first project. Downloaded to pedal. I reopened Manager following day. All songs are there. They play. No sound. .bbt files have no sound. None of the stock songs play. .wav crash has sound. I can hear the crash. I have not hooked up pedal. I wanted to make sure that was the next move. Thanks so much
1 Like
Try double-tapping the Virtual Machine or the pedal to play the section of the song or beat with the audio.
Thanks. tried on virtual main pedal. took me to the outro fill w/ no sound. Tried various other .bbt within song. No audio. Did open up a file under midi sources with nothing in it.
I do not have the actual pedal with me.
If you’ve followed the steps from the user guide and YouTube videos, it should play sound. If you don’t mind exporting a song and posting it here, I’ll take a look.
Thanks. Everything worked fine. I was pretty happy with the unit and myself (HaHa).
Next day no sound. I’m sure its something simple. Just can’t see it.Mr_Lonely.sng (1.5 MB)
Not 100% on pedal, but pretty sure all is working there.
Thanks for sharing the song. I tested it and it works fine with the Studio Legend drum set. Not quite sure what’s going on but here’s how I’d suggest trouble shooting and what steps to take next if the trouble shooting doesn’t reveal an obvious cause. Before you start the process below, quit the BeatBuddy Manager (BBM) and then launch it again. Is there any sound when your songs play? If not, go to step 1.
- Make sure your BBM has opened and is using the original project in your bbworkspace folder. If you can’t remember the project name, it’s in your SD card. A couple of pointers here: a) you should only have and be using one bbworskspace folder on your computer; b) from the BBM > Tools > Set Workspace location and navigate to your project folder and it should look something like this: users/persist/Documents/mybeatbuddy.com/BBWorkspace/user_lib/projects/US 3 - Project/US 3.bbp. Once you’ve verified this, quit the BBM and launch it again. It should work. If it doesn’t, see para. 6 below.
- Use only your BBM to manage your songs, drum sets and folders; using the Mac’s OS to try to manage those files will cause problems.
- Make sure you did not name any of your songs using a period e.g., Mrs. Robinson—this also causes headaches. If you did, please send me a private message (PM) and I’ll advise you what can be done.
- Check that the songs in your BBM project all have a drum set associated with each song. Open the Drum Sets tab in the BBM and make sure that all of the associated drum sets are active.
- If you’re confident that all of the songs sound as expected on your BeatBuddy (BB) pedal, put the SD card in your Mac’s SD slot reader (don’t use the USB cable to connect your pedal to your computer—my opinion and experience is that this sometimes causes issues during the export or synchronization process). Use the BBM > File > Open Project and navigate to your SD card and open the project and when prompted save the project to your bbworkspace giving the project a new name; accept the prompt for future synchronizations.
- If none of these steps work, all I can suggest is to search the forum for General Disaster Recovery and follow the steps in my post in that link. You’re basically going to delete your BBM and bbworkspace from your computer and start over again.
If you find out what’s going on without having to resort to the steps above, let us know the cause and what you did to fix it.
Thanks. I will.
5.
Pedal was working correctly.
I trashed everything(all files) I could find. I am sure some rookie mistakes. Only had invested an afternoon. Came directly off SD. Started at beginning. Might have been overkill. Downloaded. Updated firmware. Opened project on SD. Everything there ( all sound back) including the new drums. Another Christmas present. Thanks so much. So far so good. I appreciate you guys being so responsive. New learning curve for me.
1 Like
Thanks for letting us know how you got it working.
USB Cable Synchronization (see item 5 above)
Hi Persist.
I’m editing a drum “song” via BBM using default content beats while working through a tune in Finale. At this point I’m using 3 main loops and 1 transition fill, working on the precise placement in the score of the CC113 sends - a little tricky with multiple time signature changes of short duration. I have a pretty good handle on that now and want to add another transition to the drum parts.
I have always only updated my SD card via the PC’s (Win10) slot, as I read the same advice above some years ago. It sure would be a lot more convenient & reasonable if I could update my BBM changes to the card in situ thru a USB port. Every moment counts on a time budget as slim as mine.
I assume, since your post above is so recent, that BBM and firmware updates over the last few years have not fixed this issue. Do you know whether an attempt to address it has been made? I won’t bother to comment on other lingering expectations most of us are familiar with. Thanks.
Hello, John_Mixson. Some caveats are in order:
- My suggestion to not use the USB connection is just my opinion and was based on anecdotal observations reported by users that were unable to successfully update their pedals’ firmware or export/sync data when connecting their BeatBuddy (BB) pedal via USB cable to their computer.
- The majority of these earliest reports were by Mac users (of which I am one); I was able to verify that the problem existed on my Mac when updating the firmware on my pedal using the USB connection method.
- When Mac users connected via USB cable, there seemed to be a higher likelihood that they would brick their pedal, especially during firmware updates.
- A few Windows users also reported having similar problems but the majority seemed to be Mac users.
- Singular Sound has never formally acknowledged either a hardware (pedal), firmware or software issue using the USB connection method and thus, I don’t think that they ever tried to fix it. I’ve never tested it with the latest firmware version to see if the symptoms still exist.
- I will eventually get around to testing it again to see if the symptoms are still there. Meanwhile, I’ve just continued to use the SD slot reader because it’s reliable and for me, faster.
All that said, if you find that the USB cable connection method works best and reliably for your workflow, feel free to use that method but please let us know if you ever have any problems.
Thanks very much for your insight. I certainly wouldn’t want to “brick” my pedal considering the unknown impacts from that and attendant frustrations.
I’ll be digging further into the multiple time signatures thing since what I describe above as successful went to pot when I added another part w/transition to the song. Checking the forum this morning…
Hope to clarify just a little bit more. Bricking a pedal may have been a poor choice of words on my part to describe when the pedal does not appear to have power (screen does not light up). This is usually recoverable and the procedures are posted here on the forum. So if you want to test the USB connection method, you can do so, reasonably assured that if the worst happens, you can recover following the instructions from Pedal does not power on . If you ever run into problems, either me or Support can help.
As you’ve discovered, the BeatBuddy (BB) pedal does not handle time signature changes within multi-part songs (although the BeatBuddy Manager (BBM) seems to be able to process them, I found that once the project ends up on the pedal, the time signature difference seems to no longer be valid. Tempo changes can be handled by applying “time stretching” when editing (using your DAW) and building MIDI parts for a song. I frequently am frustrated when I find MIDI source files that have several short (≤ half a bar) time signature changes say, a song is 4/4 for the majority of the song and it has several of those very short 2/4 changes and then back to 4/4. For the musically skilled, this may or not be too much of an issue as they can work around it but for me, sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth and I either apply 4/4 throughout the entire song or find another MIDI source file for the song that does not have the time signature changes. The ability to keep time signature as well as tempo changes within BB songs has been oft-requested by users.
This song is in 6/8 with occasional single 5/4 measures.
It works quite well, once the precise positioning in Finale of the CC113 messages are established, in this format:
Part 1 w/no transition; Part 2 w/no trans; Part 3 w/transition; Part 1, etc. etc.
[6/8 main loop 1] … [6/8 main loop 2] … [5/4 main loop][6/8 transition] [6/8 main loop x] …
It even works here:
[6/8 main loop x] … [5/4 main loop][6/8 transition][5/4 main loop][6/8 transition] [6/8 main loop x] …
A very pleasant (anomalous?) outcome!
When I added a 4th Part in 6/8, BB started screwing up the 5/4 loop, and beats timing went off thereafter. Even after removing the 4th part in BBM and re-synchronizing, the BBsong remained screwed up. I had to make a new BBsong like the original - and that worked again!
(In my original draft of this score, the measure pair 5/4 6/8 above was written as two successive 4/4 measures. This didn’t conform to notation rules, so it was corrected before BB got involved. I’m not confident that reverting to 4/4 would have any benefit as far as BB is concerned.)
I’m using unedited default beats.
Is there evidence that quantizing these has a positive effect on the sync issue?