Hi BB people, I have just bought the BB and footswitch. Enjoying the challenge of getting it all to work with my Latin Trio’s set list. Is it just me or are there some issues with terminology/naming. For instance, I purchased and downloaded “HAND-PERCUSSION-1-beats” - seems good value, nice sounds. But, when it is imported, a new drum set named “Percussion” appears in italics in the Drum Sets listing and the name percussion appears in the “Default Drum Set” menu alongside the BBM “Song”. I am assuming that these are the same thing? How would I know? Then all the “Percussion” or “HAND-PERCUSSION” drum beats appear in the “Songs” list - with me so far? Then I download “BenjoCajon.DRM” that appears in the Drum Sets list with a check-box alongside it. When the checkbox is ticked, the name “Benjo Cajon” appears in the Default Drum Set list but nothing in the “Songs” list. So what is the difference between a .drm file and and the .pbf file please? I will talk about the what I find as inconsistencies in the finding, editing and using the .mid file for each of these drum beats in another posting. Perhaps a schematic showing the naming hierarchy and their file suffixes and folder positions would be helpful.
Drm is a drumset file, a Pbf is a folder file which can have a number of songs within it and an sng file in a beatbuddy song file. The hand percussion songs (beats) are specifically designed to work with the precussion drum set, but you could use any drum set with different songs with varying success. The Cajon kit is a user created drum set and there are no specific songs created for it so you will need to experiment with different songs and assign that kit to it if you want to use it.
You can put a song together from any midi file you have (max 500 events and supported midi notes) and so the naming convention is whatever the original creator called them, I also think it is important for them to be descriptive, you can always change the naming of them if you don’t like it - personally I would not make any changes to the original but only to a copy.
Hope that makes sense, I suggest you read the manager software manual - a link to it is in my signature.
Many thanks indeed for the very speedy response Psalm40 and the description of the different file types - I get that now. I HAVE read the BB Manager software manual, probably need to read it again! However in my defence of my ignorance, there is no reference at all to the terms “.pbf”; “.DRM” or “.sng” anywhere in the manual. Perhaps the author might want to include a glossary in a future edition.
My next question is with the Beat Builder.jar. I am trying to edit a beat to work with a song named Veinte Anos (not being able to find one that fits well). If in Beat Builder I open a .mid file from the Brazilian folder that is close and play it in Beat Builder, it sounds different from playing it in BB Manager. And then in Beat Builder if I do a “save as” and edit the .mid file, it does not play at all when the new saved file is brought into BB Manager - totally silent unless I select another drum set. Yet it plays in Beat Builder. So what am I doing wrong?