No, it won’t. This will be an additional perk.
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If you like things random, don’t worry about using the AP. Load beat variations into drum fills and trigger at will.
To confirm and document it here, are you saying that choosing “Shuffle the order of the drum fills” as set in the BB Manager causes the fills in that slot to be chosen from randomly every time triggered?
This is cool for what it is, but beyond that though, I note that this is not quite the same as the randomization mentioned for the reason that it currently requires constant retriggering by the user (ie. attention and tap dancing) when what was being suggested amounted to having the BB play in a (semi-) random manner unattended until “kicked” into what’s next.
IOW, just like a human drummer could either a) play a pre-chosen pattern over and over again exactly, for an indefinite (or definite) time, or b) play in an un-fully-predetermined way, with some elements of surprise, but still within the “feel” of the song, until the “nod” comes to wrap up the jam move to the next section.
Granted, BB is not an AI box, and that’s why what we call random is perhaps more properly semi-random, in that some pool of material must be defined in advance. Some list from which the BB would randomly choose …
Still, the big point here, IMO, is that the “random” section has just enough smarts to keep playing without the user having to constantly retrigger it.
I can see why this might be considered in some ways a different discussion/feature than AutoPilot, but I can also see that in a complex arrangement such as AutoPilot was specifically conceived for, a user might also wish to have one or more self-playing random areas.
When enabling the shuffle drum fills button, the order of triggered fills will be at random.
I also want to clarify that we, drummers, don’t just randomly play things. You wouldn’t have a good drummer play a backbeat groove and then just throw in a bar of swing to spice things up. The variations are musical and emotional decisions that may be made depending on what is going on musically at the time.
The vast majority of BeatBuddy users not only want the beats to be consistent, but also simple. That’s a hard lesson I learned through trial and error. Any kind of further automatic humanizing that you mention can not be and should not be done by simply shuffling the order of bars within a loop or randomly triggering drum fills. Those variations would have to be slight in order not to sound ridiculous, unmusical and unusable. And such a system would require a more sophisticated approach and algorithms in order to work well across the board.
This is certainly a function that can be looked at as a major new feature for BeatBuddy in the future.
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Me personally? No, I wouldn’t. But someone might.
I mean, some people choose to take a perfectly good piano and “prepare” it with forks and spoons and other decidedly non-pianistic objects as part of their creative process.
I will not presume to say “Thou Shalt Not!”.
My comments are more about what is or can be possible or else impossible, responding in this case to austoralopithecus’ description of his “ideal autopilot”.
If BB might actually evolve with a musical intelligent humanizing feature at some point in the future, that would be fantastic! I wouldn’t have thought the current tech would support that.
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Goran,
It’s now four weeks since you said the Auto Pilot might be ready in three weeks. Any further update?
Tim
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I’m not surprised that this is all taking longer than anticipated back in July - it’s a major enhancement and a big job after all.
Is the process still ongoing? Might we perhaps have a few words about the status?
Hey guys,
sorry about the delay. Yes, the process is still going. There have been bugs discovered that need to be fixed. You can view the status on the GitHub page for the BB Manager. We are in the process of programming the Premium Library song collection to work with AP.
The software developer Julissa, who had been taking care of the BB Manager has unfortunately moved on to another company at the end of last week and @iajrz is taking over the project.
The AP functionality is 99% there, but because of the bugs, it is not ready for prime time. Also, we need to make sure that the firmware is 100% ok before giving this a thumb up. The firmware player depends on the player code from the BB Manager.
So, at this point, it is not about features, but about bugs which would impede proper playing of certain songs.
I personally can’t help with programming, but only with testing, reporting and design. I have been waiting on this for the last 3 years and as you can imagine I am itching just like you to see this come to life.
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Thanks kindly for the update!
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Is this happening on a public branch? Can’t see the list of commits in github for some reason and don’t see activity on the master branch.
Thanks for the update (and sorry about the loss of the developer).
Yes, the code and the work can be seen by anybody. And anybody can pitch in, too.
All branches are slated to be integrated before the end of the week. I noticed the conversation about the branches and their related issues was happening in an internal chat. I have already asked the team to remedy that.
Thanks. I see the commits on the “issue” branches. Good luck with picking up the pieces from Julissa.
AP has been in development for years - I’ve been asking since 2017 - always promised…never delivered
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AP development started a few years ago, but was not properly developed or competed. This is different.
The main functionality is done. Bugs are being worked on.
Additionally, we have been working on content programming for weeks now. It is going to happen.
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How about programming a working, user-friendly Version of BBmanager from scratch? We encounter so many problems setting up our music order and drum kits. For example: i’m saving a project on mac in dropbox. My friend opens the same project on PC, song order is messed up, drumsets missing. the song numbers seem to not transfer to Windows version of BBmanager. Another problem: if i add a drum kit the order in the config.sys changes so that Hex changes from Forescore won’t switch to the right drum set. Still no drag and drop and easy copying of songs. Autopilot seems great, but please, please, please do a makeover of the software.
By the way: ritardando and transition fills longer than 1 bar would be helpful as well
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Singular Sound tried to do exactly what you’re asking for about two years ago. Their developer failed to deliver.
Will they try again? Perhaps if there’s enough demand however, I think the best we can hope for short-term would a bug-free version of the BBM (which is what they are working on now).
Howdy —
Is there a good “full autopilot” song available to download somewhere?
I installed qt and Microsoft and got 1.8.0 up and running on windows. (Will do again later on Mac… and maybe on Linux.)
Anyway: I can see the new autopilot checkboxes… and can even sort of get them to work.
But having a “full autopilot” song example to try out could be a better example of how it will all work.
I don’t think any of the Singular Sound content has been updated yet.