Effect of BB Sobriety Mode on Aeros?

The Aeros doesn’t handle BPM and time signature changes once you’ve recorded something. Beyond not handling it (and not warning when it happens), there are lots of weird bugs that occur like sound dropouts, display issues, etc.

Sobriety mode on the BB does some interesting things that could be an issue for the Aeros. We don’t have enough info to understand if this might cause an issue.

FYI, “one beer” mode is actually useful. It gets rid of the stiffness, precision of the BB.

Bump @BrennanSingularSound @persist Does Sobriety change the clock/bpm in a way that Aeros would treat as anything but jitter?

Since I don’t use the sobriety capability, it further begs the question as to whether or not it would have the same affect (Aeros jitter) if a BB one-press song has several tempo changes when time-stretching was used to come up with the song.

Not having a BB, but using other external clocks with Aeros, I’ve seen that if you can send Clock alone without sending Real-Time Start, then Aeros remains on the Song page and you can watch the BPM value change. Can BB just send Clock without Start? For really minor changes, it may not register, but for high “sobriety” settings (Low sobriety?) perhaps the BPM changes are visible if it’s being manipulated. In my experience, it doesn’t take much of a change for long for Aeros to report the new value.

If BB can’t send Clock alone, perhaps you have something that can filter out Start to put between them.

TLDR; One Beer mode seems ok when sync’d to the Aeros … with a minor display issue that may or may not be related.

One Beer seems to vary the BPM +/- 2 bpm or so. Anecdotally, I think the BB in this mode tends to drag behind the beat (slower bpm) more often than it plays ahead of the beat. The effect may be more pronounced with a slower BPM becauses the jitter does not seem to scale with the BPM (but hard to say for sure). I suspect this is not a truly random with an uniform distribution.

I recorded a short loop at 80 bpm and another one at 140 BPM. Focusing on the first beat of the rhythm, it sounded fine. I left the 140 BPM run for a few hours and it sounded ok as well … I think. I may not have the best ear for this type of thing or be too picky about it.

The only thing I noticed was the Aeros display was a bit jittery. I wasn’t scrolling the screen as smoothly as it normally does. This did not fix itself when I disabled sobriety mode. Stopping and starting made the display smooth.

Hey all, to answer OP, BB’s sobriety mode is not meant to be used in tandem with the Aeros. In reality, it was meant as a joke on April Fools, and we were pleasantly surprised to see how people prefer it to “straighter” playing on a single BPM (which does make sense).

That being said, we still have not given the Aeros audio the potential to change to a varying tempo source once sound has been recorded, and likely never will allow recording to the Aeros with a varying tempo.

The former requires software changes that will allow us to smartly (and without much degradation at maybe less than 5-10% change) change tempo and ‘warp’ existing audio to new tempos on-the-fly. This is claimed possible but is not a priority at this time. We understand this is a great potential use and we do want to spend time on it soon. The latter, however, would require creating some form of tempo maps and we are not aiming down that road currently.

As far as Aeros is concerned this BB state causes de-syncs and cannot be supported currently.

Thank you for the questions and reporting!

The sobriety mode shouldn’t effect the outgoing Clock pulse. It’s the drummer that gets a bit drunk, not the whole band. :crazy_face:

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Good news is that while It may not be supported (which is totally fine), recording and playing back with One Beer worked out for two quick tests. Longer loops might diverge as the “error” accumulates…

I do think the idea of a looser, more human BB is something for the next gen device.

Unless the rescaling of the audio is extremely high quality, I’d personally prefer to have a mismatched BPM to not rescale the audio … and have some non-blockng warning (orange shading somewhere in the UI perhaps)

The jitter on the display has nothing to do with this or midi. It’s just what happens when the looper is running for a long time…

Interesting idea!

I can forward your thoughts, thanks

That’s quite correct. And I think if you did it would damage the positive effects of a drunk BB. The drunk BB humanises precisely because it’s not exactly in sync. In a MIDI system then the drunk BB should internally be maintaining its perfect midi clock but the playback around the clock gets sloppy. No other device should ever see the clock drifting.

The advantage of coding it with a hard outbound MIDI clock (and it sounds like that’s what you’ve done, I hope) is that BB would be perfectly able to be drunk even if it weren’t the MIDI master.

Aeros on the other hand is playing back already human samples. If we want it to be drunk then we have to drink the beer ourselves.

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:rofl:

Thanks for the feedback!