o.k so I bought and downloaded the new vintage Ludwig drumkit awhile back…now I never noticed until tonight when I was using my beatbuddy and I went to change drumkits and all my other drumkits are totally gone not even on my card. not sure what gives on this because when I go into my beatbuddy manager it shows all my kits there. I even put the sd card in my pc and tried to sync up everything and it says all is good and synced up…but when I put the sd card back into the beatbuddy it still only shows the Ludwig drumkit. this sucks!!! please help me out here, and it was a total pain in the butt just getting the vintage Ludwig drumkit onto the card in the first place. thanks. darrylw.
I can’t tell from your description what’s happened to your drum kits but here are a couple of tips I follow to minimize the likelihood of this happening again:
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Keep your project opens/saves as ‘clean’ as possible. I see two ways to do this: A) Working the project directly from your SD card and using the computer to archive/backup your project. or B) If you need more than one project, do all the work on your projects on your computer, then load the needed project onto your SD card from your computer only when you need to use it on the BB. I don’t trust the synchronize feature because I can’t tell if my current project is open from my SD card or my computer and it’s critical not to get them mixed up. Just use the Open, Save, and Save As commands. Use Open/Save when working on your project. Use Save As when making your final save/backup or doing a transfer between the SD card and the computer.
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When working with songs, folder, and drum kits, you must use the Import/Export commands in the BB Manager. Do not use the operating system’s file/folder management features to load the song/folder/kit into the BB or the SD card. The BB has it’s own management system (see the .xls files on your SD card as an example) so you must use BBManager if you want the BB to see the songs/folder/drum kits. To use extra drum kits, you have an extra step - you need to import the Drum kit into your project, then you must go into the list of drum kits and activate the kit by checking the boxes of all the drum kits you want to make active on the BB.
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That said, it can help #2 if you’re disciplined about how you manage files outside of the BB Manager. This is mostly a concern if you purchase add-on kits/beats or build your own songs from either an external midi editor or with the BB Manager. I recommend storing anything external to BB Manager in a separate, well-organized folder outside the BB workspace so you can easily track your purchased kits/beats/songs and make the import process easier as you build future projects. Also, I like to take existing songs, tweak the tempo and kit, then save as a new song. Because these builds are for particular songs, I export them from the BB Manager to a separate folder with the name of the song (rather than the name of the generic beat) so I can import them for future projects or set lists when I need them.
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Some folks have had issues with the pedal configuration settings (footswitch settings, feature tweaks etc.) getting overwritten when moving a project from the computer to the SD card or BB. The reason this happens is that each project retains an independent version of the pedal configuration settings. If you change the pedal configuration on the BB but don’t overwrite what’s stored in the projects on your computer, you’ll overwrite the pedal settings every time you move a project from the computer to the SD card. The way to avoid this is to get the pedal configured the way you want it, then save that project to your computer and build all future projects from that initial project. I haven’t been able to locate which file on the SD card retains the pedal configuration settings so I haven’t been able to find a more sophisticated way to do this. If you change your pedal configuration on a regular basis, this might be a little bit of a hassle. You might request future versions of BB Manager and firmware to provide more explicit configuration management controls.
It’s difficult to explain the above in text but the above procedures will become second nature once you’ve tried them a couple of times. I don’t chalk this up to poor design, I think the BB is mostly very well designed. You have a great tool, but robust tools often have a learning curve with them. (This next comment isn’t directed at you so don’t take this personally. Your posting is fine.) Rather than whine about how using the BB isn’t instantly obvious, take a little time to learn what the BB developers have done, then provide them with CONSTRUCTIVE feedback via the Feature Requests section on this forum.
Two things to verify:
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Are all the checkmark boxes ticked in the ‘drum’ tab of the BeatBuddy Manager? If not, they should be.
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If everything looks good and as it should be in the software (including the verification above), then synchronize your project to your SD card: File > Synchronize Project. If for some reason that option is greyed out, you need to export your project to your SD card: File > Export > Project to SD Card - and make sure that the correct drive is chosen.
to get all my drumkits back to the sd card I checked on all the kits inside the manager…then I exported them to the card…now have all my drumkits back. So, let me now ask you do I need to always keep all the drumkits checked on always in the manager? I usually just see only one drumkit checked on…the kit I’m usually listening to in the manager. Maybe that is why everytime I install a new drum kit to the manager I lose all the other kits? This has happened before…
If you are going to export the project to the SD card, yes - you must make sure that there are no tick boxes unchecked in the ‘drums’ tab (unless you don’t want those drumsets on your pedal).