BeatBuddy AutoPilot 2020?

We don’t have anything out yet, as the testing and bug removal is still going on. But, you can play around with it yourself if you have the beta version of the software. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory. The settings text changes depending on what you enable.

Hello, I am brand new with BB and should receive mine in the next coming days…
FYI but I just built BBM 1.8.0 on Linux. It works and I see the autopilot checkboxes, if it helps:

I will probably soon get to know what it means… As I have clearly no idea what BBM is actually really made for… Compiling… done… Let’s read the doc :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I have not yet bought a BB. I am still “on the table” because I’m not sure it would be that great for a complete newbie like me. But I am a programmer so I had no problem downloading the 1.8.0 version of BBM and compiling it… and loading the default drumsets and such.

This lets’ me play with it on my computer as if I had the actual device… so I can “try before I buy”.

I think the BBM is mainly used to load new things to the BB hardward device. But it also allows you to edit songs and drumsets. With the new version these new autopilot stuff allows you setup a set of patterns to play so you can have a “one button press song”. Which is probably REALLY good for newbie beginners. On the otehr hand… there is the school of thought that the manual push of the buttons as needed manually while playing is “better” for learning.

Anyway… I’m still undecided. BUT if the autopilot works as needed AND all of the songs (Or a lot of them) in the premium pack get updated properly… then i"ll probably spend the money.

FWIW, I’m a newbie guitarist (about 4 months in to my journey) and having the BB (for about a month) has been GREAT! Granted I’ve been a drummer for about 45 years, so my rhythm is already pretty solid, but playing my chord transitions with a backing beat, plus the ability to throw in fills and beat changes has been a great tool, and way better than a metronome. I’ve also loaded and played to some of the OPB songs on here (e.g., Margaritaville and Sweet Caroline) and it’s been a blast. Anyway, just my two cents from a fellow newbie.

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What are the advantages of Auto Pilot vs One Press?

All.
“One Press” is just a single midi file that plays through like a backing track, not giving you any flexibilities to play fills, shorten or extend section. Basically, you may as well use a full karaoke track instead.

The autopilot, on the other hand, gives you full flexibility and interaction, as you normally have with the BB. You can just press the pedal once and let it play from beginning to end without touching it, or you can shorten and lengthen sections at will, end early, trigger fills etc.

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That’s exactly what I’m looking very much forward to :grinning:

Thanks for your response. I have been going back and forth on whether to spend the money. I’ve also been waiting for the autopilot stuff that looks useful.

One reason I have waited is because I was lucky and found a Boss DR3 for $10.00 at a pawn shop. The BOSS DR3 can let you add/edit etc… but all done manually on the device itself. Can’t use a computer. (I gave up trying to figure it out and since it was only $10.00… not great loss of money.)

The BB would allow me to edit things using the BBM on my computer… so I really like that better. PLUS you can buy actual songs. SOME of the “premium” songs I can listen to and I just “know” the song. Some are kind of obscure.

On the website… they created sample songs with a bunch of songs thrown into one file. So it is hard to tell which part of the file is for which song. Confusing. I think that if spent some time and created 30 seconds samples for all of their songs… and INDIVIDUALLY let people press play for each song that would be more helpful. And I mean helpful enough that I probably wouldn’t have waited this long to buy BB and I will also buy the premium library.

I know there is a workaround to add some bass notes. BUT I wish the premium libraries supported a bass as well as the drums. THAT would be a newbie dream come true. Like playing with the band. I would have laid out the $500.00 months ago if they included that. HECK I’d even pay more to upgrade to have that also.

ANYWAY THANKS: I think based on your input I am off to go spend money. $500.00. (OH well just bought the wife a new iPad. So she won’t complain. :wink: )

Hi @persist,
Where can I find BBM version 1.8.0. (assuming it is a beta still) …

No problem…glad I could help :wink: . I was a bit on the fence too and then I found a brand new one in a local online marketplace that someone tried and didn’t like. I got it for about 2/3rds the cost of a new one so to me that was a no-brainer. I also bought the premium library and have been blown away by how many beats and songs are in there…to me the AutoPilot is just a bonus that I didn’t know about when I bought the BB. I have also learned about BBM and drumkits with bass lines from the songs posted so nicely by folks on this forum (@persist is a standout in that category) and I’ve been having a blast with the BB.

I am really looking forward to the AutoPilot feature though, especially with the functionality that Goran has already mentioned in this thread.

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The bass added to BB drumsets is just a hack and not an officially supported functionality. That’s the reason why we haven’t gone down that rabbit hole with the premium content. The available memory is already very limited for the drums themselves.
However, for a future iteration of BB (whenever that may come about), I have already proposed to include support for an additional 2 instruments. I will continue to urge the development in that direction once the time comes, as I know that it is a highly needed and desired feature. I have some ideas on how those additional instruments could work.
With regards to demos, it would not be practical to include everything from every song. They are there just for reference. If you are looking for beats for a particular song and it is available, know that they are authentic transcriptions of the originals.

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Not sure why you’d do this? Leave it as a dedicated drum unit…Jeez you can get far FAR better results using a DAW and creating your own backing track MP3’s.

BeatBuddy is a live drum tool, not a MIDI playback machine! If people want to hack it, well, good luck to them, but please don’t follow Alice down the rabbit hole. You have a great and successful niche product. There is NOTHING else out there close to BB…there are however LOTS of midi file players! jmo No offence meant to anyone.

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As a 45+ year drummer and new guitarist, I agree with this 100%.

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If you’re using Windows, it can be found in the Releases page on GitHub (download Releases.zip and unzip it)

For Mac or Linux you will need to compile the source code

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See MarkF48’s post

Is there somewhere a dedicated explanation how to compile this for Mac? I tried with QT Creator & homebrew but there seem to be missing links

From https://github.com/SingularSound/openbbm/commit/cf756cb12d810eb8bcdd169faf42fef73fa4fc25

Please let us know how it turns out

Building in MacOS X

Initial Setup

To build BBManager you’ll need the current suported version of qt installed.

You will need the latest version of qt to build the BeatBuddy Manager. You can get it from homebrew using brew install qt. Make sure to follow all instructions, as there may be issues with symlink creation that require you to add the binary directory to your path manually.

To successfully run BBManager, you need a local installation of libquazip and libMinini.

Ideally, set up Qt Creator and configure it to work with your installation of Qt. This will allow you to run the project from the IDE without any further work.

Those should be installed at the ~/lib directory after running the make install command, because the OS looks for shared libraries there without any configuration; the files to be moved into that directory can be found in BBManager/libs/quazip/macx/release and BBManager/libs/minIni/macx/release respectively.

If you decide not to set up Qt Creator, you will need to provide suitable binaries of libquazip and libminIni to be loaded dynamically.

Building and Deploying

The project beatbuddy-manager-lite.pro will hold all project of the BeatBuddy Manager, so in order to run the application the project file is BBManagerLean/BBManagerLean.pro as this will run the BeatBuddy Manager. In BBManager/project you can build by running qmake && make clean && make all. The BBManager.app will be in the same directory, and you can run this to test the app.

While dependencies don’t change, future builds can be done with just make.

To pack for deployment - ie: to share with other people - you need to run BBManager/mac_deployment/deploy.sh with BBManager/project/BBManager.app as an argument; this will make the dynamic libraries be loaded from the BBManager.app bundle, instead of them being sought elsewhere in the system.

The deployment script has been temporarily decomissioned; we will bring it back soon. In order to distribute the app you need to make sure to build it and include the libraries in the bundle, making sure they point at the included dependencies as needed.

@persist Thank You! That ist much more complete than the current description on github

I think these scripts are missing from the repository - but you might not need them if you are just compiling and running on your own machine

Back to the original post…any update when AutoPilot will be generally available?

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