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I like the Infinity Looper with my Beat Buddy.
I use the Infinity Looper with the Beat Buddy. It syncs perfectly, simple to use, and sounds great. [ATTACH=full]507[/ATTACH]
[quote=“guitargirlts9, post:1, topic:84”]
I’d like to hear people’s experiences with their Beat Buddy’s and Loopers via midi sync. I have a Boss RC-50 looper and have hooked it up to my Beat Buddy via the midi sync. I’m noticing that the looper gets out of sync after a while when I loop with the looper’s guide beats on. I love my RC-50’s guide beats and would love to be able to incorporate them with the Beat Buddy too, but they keep getting out of sync after a few minutes.
I’m know the Boss loopers are known for having shoddy midi sync capabilities, but perhaps others are having better luck. Does anyone know if the RC-300 has better midi syncing? I’ve been experimenting with using the AUTO, INTERNAL, and REMOTE midi settings, but I don’t know much about midi at all.
I would also love to hear about others experiences using their Beat Buddies with other midi sync loopers such as the Boomerang III and Pigtronix Inifinity Looper since that is what they recommended when I posted on their facebook page.
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I’ve been using BB as the master for “Loopy” on an iPad. Loopy is arguably the best iPad looper, and the sync works flawlessly. I use a Roland UM-1 USB-midi interface running through the USB port provided with the camera connection kit for an iPad. MidiBridge is an excellent midi manager for iPad and I recommend it for this type of linkage. AudioBus can help you link in packages for amp modelling and recording such as Amplitude and Garageband. The loop begins when I press the BB pedal, and stops when I press stop on the stomp box or when I double press the pedal and BB completes. Loopy allows users to save and retrieve loops, and so the combination is powerful for retrieved backup loops in gigs as well as live performance of looping. I am very happy with this facility.
Tip: Don’t record BB to a loop. Instead run the BB output straight into your PA. iPad processing imposes a very tiny delay and so a recorded loop of BB doesn’t sound as tight as having BB lead the whole performance.
I had to disconnect midi sync to use looper by itself…even with BB off it still sent a midi signal controlling the Infinity. Then I discovered the midi thru feature on BB which disconnects the two.
I didn’t read anything about changing midi defaults on the Infinity…BB says they have a firmware update…I think I will stick with the Boomerang though. Thank you for your reply!
That is where I started Mark…RC300 would send midi out to BB only. I had some crazy moments where I’m on a 100 bpm tempo let’s say…looping progression…close loop and tempo jumps to say 85 bpm…train wreck. I’ve just tried Infinity and Boomerang…going with Boomerang.
Neither.
I am a huge fan and I was inspired very heavily by the BeatBuddy right from when I first saw that project going on IndieGoGo.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching and reverse engineering bits and pieces that were available to me. I was originally intending to develop my own version of BBManager (Lite) based on my guessed closed proprietary formats that BeatBuddy is using. Right now I have the complete source code and an NDA in place as a guideline so I won’t accidentally damage Singular Sound intellectual property.
I’ve tried (for fun) making exactly that like months ago. When my Boomerang is MIDI sync’ed to the BeatBuddy and Boomerang goes after BeatBuddy so it actually records my playing together with the beats from it, when I play my loop new drums from BeatBuddy and the old (recorded) drums from BeatBuddy align absolutely perfectly. No delays at all.
same issue for me on the rc 505
yep I agree that would be fantastic
I completely disagree with this comment. I have my Boss RC505 controlling a large network of devices. It’s rock solid. Never had a sync issue with the RC505 as the master. I’m very happy about this. However, the BB simply falls out of sync where every other device holds it’s sync. To me, this is clearly a BB issue.
It doesn’t.
What is the problem? I was unable to reproduce that.
RC505 (Master)->BB.
BB falls off time after a minute or two. Inconstantly, and unpredictably.
Have tested Moog LP->BB and experience the same issue.
This makes the BB downstream from any midi device essentially unusable.
I’ll pass that to the team for further investigation.
Thanks for reporting the issue!
I love loopy…can you give more details as to how you set up loopy?
I know the RC-300 really well and may have some solutions to the problems users are pointing out. I’m keeping a close eye on the RC-300 issues. I’m a very likely BB buyer if the developers can assure me that the BeatBuddy will reliably slave to the RC-300. But if not, forget it.
Chris is correct about the RC-300’s MIDI reliability. I’ve used the RC-300 as a MIDI master for many, many MIDI devices and it is perfectly solid as a master. If there are problems with the BB drifting, it’s not the RC-300.
It’s true that it doesn’t make a good slave, but it is not intended to be a slave to anything other than another RC-300. That’s where its bad rep comes from when it comes to MIDI syncing. But this does not apply to the unit as a master at all.
Here are a couple things to keep in mind for anyone testing.
I’m seeing two issues here. I may have some workarounds / places to look for answers.
1) The BeatBuddy suddenly jumps tempo after the First Loop is Closed.
I have a strong hunch that this glitch is not actually a glitch, but a settings issue. Bear with me as I explain.
The RC-300 will not quantize loops to your default tempo unless the drum machine is set to ON. If you want to quantize loop length without hearing the internal drum machine, turn it ON but set the volume to zero.
If quantization is OFF (the drum machines is off), the first measures of clock sent by the RC-300 after hitting REC the first time are going to differ from whatever you get after hitting REC the second time to tie off the first loop. This is because the machine is trying to guess your tempo based on the length of your loop. But until you’ve completed a loop, it will use the default tempo, which will be different!
This would account for the problem Chris and sixstring are describing where after you close the loop, the tempo jumps. Please check your settings and confirm if this is the cause of your issue. If I am correct, this is neither a problem with the RC-300 nor the BeatBuddy. It’s just the RC-300 doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Another way you could confirm my hunch is by pressing the Tap Tempo button one time before you loop, which will bring your BPM up on the display. As you can see, the number will change when you terminate the first loop if quantize is off. See if that number matches what the BeatBuddy is doing.
Again – If you want to quantize loop length without hearing the internal drum machine, turn it ON but set the volume to zero. See if that fixes your problem. It sounds to me like you’ve just got quantization turned off when really, you just wanted the drum machine to be silent.
2) The BeatBuddy Drifts From the RC-300’s Clock
This behavior is much more disconcerting. It shouldn’t be happening. However I can think of one potential workaround. Two simple questions might lead us to the answer:
A) Is the RC-300 BPM set to a whole number?
B) Is the BeatBuddy capable of BPMs between whole numbers?
The RC-300’s BPM setting is very precise. You can set it to fractions, such as 156.3. Looking at the software, The BeatBuddy editor software looks like it rounds to whole numbers. Naturally, this could create drift depending on how the BeatBuddy works.
I’ve noticed that some devices really dislike getting fractions. I use a GT-6 guitar multi-effect (also by BOSS, incidentally). It has beat-synced effects that will lock in via MIDI clock. When I first got it, it seemed like all the beat-synced effects worked great except for the Delay effect, which was very glitchy for some reason. After a lot of troubleshooting, I discovered that it worked perfectly as long as the RC-300 BPM was set to a whole number. I had similar glitches with the Delay on an Adrenalinn III, but sold it before I realized this workaround, so I can’t confirm if it would fix it there, too, but I bet it would have.
Since then, I’ve gotten away from using the foot pedals on the RC-300 to set my tempo, because there is a high probability I’ll end up with a fraction. Instead I hit the Tap Tempo button and use the knob to select a whole number.
Now, this shouldn’t really have to be a problem, and even if I’m right, I’d encourage the devs to look at their syncing approach. Many other devices don’t experience any issue when synced to the RC-300 on fractional BPMs. Still, this may make the RC-300 useable with the BeatBuddy when it wasn’t before.
Hope that helped both the users and the developers… looking forward to hearing about this. 
I’ve never had that RC-300 piece of Boss, but I know BeatBuddy should correctly slave to whatever fractional tempo you have set - as long as your master device keeps on sending MIDI quarter notes. Then only explanation to any drifts you may experience when looping would be if master device is not sending MIDI quarter notes in due times (and this would neither be a BeatBuddy problem, nor it could potentially be fixed by BeatBuddy firmware at all).
Anyways, speculations and stating about possible theoretical problems is not very helpful. I will be checking BeatBuddy MIDI sync capabilities soon. After that I can state whether there are any internal issues with MIDI sync’ing inside the firmware code.
can you buy a mini midi to standard male to male? ( so I can hook up BB to looper with one cable).
I know @neophytte has uploaded a schematic of the pins (huge props to him!) so one can easily solder a cable for himself
http://mybeatbuddy.com/forum/index.php?threads/diy-midi-cable.1599/#post-6692
http://neophytte.mine.nu/forum/simpleforum_files/attachments/BeatBuddyMidiPinout.jpg