BeatBuddy Manager Goes Open Source: What this Means for Users, Our Development Priorities, and How You Can Get Involved

I never said anything about Qt.

Seems like a reasonable choice for cross platform development.

IMHO, having the right people is more important. My guess is this not just an issue of having the right engineer(s).

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My bad…

Hello … ello … llo …lo …o…
Is anybody out there ?

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Don’t be scared by the peaks in 2020… They each represent less than … wow … 30 commits… in a week !?!

Ok, it’s so quiet, that must be because everything is fixed and stabilized… :thinking:

Capture d'écran Deepin_zone de sélection _20210322135409

Ah ? Maybe not… And I am afraid that bugs reported there are not even fully representative of all the problems with BBM.

Ok, just to be serious 5 minutes. Should we consider BBM an abandonware ?

Would be nice to have an official from Singular Sound commenting about that. What is the strategy ? Is there an alternative ?

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Like I said many many time before…Source it to someone who knows what they are doing. I am sure a lot of us would pay a few bucks for a superior product.

The question about BBM is not that they are doing the wrong things or push developments in what we would consider the wrong direction, not putting the emphasis on topics we would consider essential.
No the problem with the BBM is that nothing happens at all.

If you re-read the beginning of this thread, there is one person supposed to be dedicated.
Considering not a single commit has been done on the repository for months, my question that I consider legitimate is: Is the BBM an abandonware ?

The problem of saying a third party should be involved, someone who “knows what they are doing”, is that it you will need to train them, because the documentation around the code, the file formats is purely non-existent. Thus from Singular Sound point of view, this will require quite a bit of work too…

I would prefer they keep the knowledge. There is a lot to develop around the Aeros, the BeatBuddy and potentially the Maestro. Those devices rock but they are clearly not served by a consistent desktop environment…

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If you check on this thread David addressed the issue regarding the Manager. His comment is about halfway through the thread. It sounds like there is a new team working on it currently with a complete new rebuild. Whether this comes to fruition we’ll wait and see.

Hopefully they can get it up and running right and with the features we all want. :+1:

Even if it’s the case, we have no visibility, neither on dates nor features, and we are pretty far from open Source…

Yeah I get the feeling the open source development has come to a crashing halt.

For that, it should have taken off at some point

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Claiming you do open source is not a matter of saying you are and publishing some code. If you want people to move onboard, you need to have documentation, tutorials, and it never voided the need to have internal resources to manage the repository, organize the releases, prioritize issues and PRs…
When you see that there is no doc on the core file formats, no way to easily manipulate them…it’s not motivating anyone…

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I tried to get involved but fell at the first hurdle of trying to get the QT software stuff to compile the source, kept throwing debug errors on QT files that were there so I gave up. Don’t mind being paid to do code but give up on losing my weekends when I should be practising/playing.

I think I was the first non-Singular Sound employee to issue a PR on the BBM (to provide the Linux build)…

It was just for fun, because at that time I didn’t even have a BeatBuddy… but I was just super excited Singular Sound would take the turn of Open Source.

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You couldn’t be more correct.

I did some fairly complicated Qt projects in the past and would get involved a bit if it was interesting to me. But not to be an unpaid resource for Singular. That means they should be developing in the open, not just doing large code dumps once a year. They shouldn’t be developing a “new” version in private, it should have been started in the open, with the github repository as the working repository. There should be an integration manager to get user-initiated work into the main build. And exactly as you say: enough documentation to make the barrier to entry easy.

So, while it’s all very well that they’re starting again (supposedly), they’re already starting badly because it’s being done on a new closed source code base.

I honestly think Singular would do better, across the board, if they open sourced all their code. Aeros, BeatBuddy, Maestro. They should get some people who are good at building open source communities and be a really good hardware company who encourages open source developers to get involved – knowing the OSS community, Aeros would be running Doom by the end of the week. They’ve got good hardware – and selling that is where the money comes from. There are no secrets in their source code, so nothing to protect there (every company thinks their source code is this valuable jewel that their competitors would love to steal – they’re wrong), and software is where their weakness lies.

I would have a lot more faith in my Singular products continuing to be useful if their software became community owned. Jeez, get the guy who wrote SooperLooper - Live Looping Sampler to come and integrate it as the looper engine for Aeros. Get the guy who works on Hydrogen to do work with BeatBuddy. There are experts out there who might come forward if it seemed worthwhile.

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Classic!! :grinning:

But seriously, you’ve made some really good points in here.

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I agree, some of those Open Source projects really rock. I like as well Luppp which is a bit the “quantized” mode of the Aeros when SooperLooper is more the freeform mode. At some point before buying an Aeros I was considering investing in Midi to pilot those guys, but guess what hold me ? Exactly what you said: I don’t want to need a computer for gigs and I really liked the Singular Sound hardware. At that point I had no idea what the software would really allow or not.

The strong point of Singular Sound is the hardware, and I completely agree the fact companies always think they’ve produced the software of the century when they’re actually only redesigning the wheel again and again… But it’s always very difficult for them to realize that, and especially for the people involved in the development. Of course the hardware always introduces constraints and this has to be taken in account but the start-from-scratch syndrome is generally a very bad pattern.

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Interesting conversation with recent posts. Although Singular Sound’s strong points may be their hardware, those strong points become vulnerabilities when the software cannot be developed or maintained to effectively operate their pedals.

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Ditto.

I seriously investigated how hard it would be to buy a Raspberry Pi and a MIDI controller to push commands into an open source looper; but I liked the idea of a nice polished bit of dedicated hardware – and that it worked nicely with BB (after all I’d rather be playing in my off time than farting with computers). To be fair, I’m generally pleased with my Aeros+BeatBuddy combo, it’s met my meagre needs (2x2x2 quantised). That being said: what I don’t like is that each firmware update feels like a crapshoot – is something going to break? (And worse: is it going to break the day of a gig?)

I’d also add that I didn’t gig a lot pre-lockdown, and obviously haven’t gigged at all since last January – and there are still enough weird behaviours that I don’t seem to be able to reliably reproduce that I’m not sure I’d trust Aeros for live situations. It’s that software reliability angle that makes me annoyed and be so convinced that open source would improve it.

I get more and more tempted the more I read about their internal design to put my money where my mouth is and make the product I think Aeros should be. It’s not a million miles from what I do as a day job; and I think there are enough developers on here that are looper musicians that would make open source development viable. It’s a shame I’m such a lazy bastard :smiley:

Edit: (I hadn’t known about Lupp before – thank you for pointer)

I wish I had kept up with programming. I pretty much stopped on C back in the Amiga days, and before that Commodore Basic! :crazy_face:

I would of loved to have had a play.

That idea crossed my mind more than once. The point is that you need professional in/out or adding extra USB sound hardware, but definitely the Raspberry is not enough in itself on that front.

I can add that I do use my BB + Aeros every single day and globally it’s a pleasure, but like you I find updates not reliable enough (even when you wait for a release to be pushed as an official OTA firmware) and sometimes I would like to go further with BBM to create my own songs, but the Linux version barely works, and fails miserably when dealing with song edition, and the process to synchronize with BBM is purely non existent (but it looks like other platforms are not really first class citizen neither :slight_smile: ).

Then I play to forget.

[EDIT] Ah sorry I didn’t catch what you meant… You mean using a Pi and midi controller to kind of replace a Singular Sound Maestro ?

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No, you were right originally - looper. And right about the fact that so much extra hardware would be needed that it’s not a practical solution. Hence… Aeros.