There’s one thing I would love to see, though: easy wireless compatibility with a haptic metronome, like the Soundbrenner Pulse.
Why?
I do a ton of looping on my own, but have a lot of trouble live looping with my drummer in jam sessions; without an in-ear monitor rig, it’s hard for him to stay in time with the loops, even if they’re quantized and perfectly in time. We don’t want to play with an audible click, though (no in-ear solution and want to be able to loop on-stage).
If we could synchronize haptic feedback to the MIDI clock of the Aeros, I could get so much more creative with my songwriting.
I know that this would be possible if we connected the MIDI clock to a DAW, and then used bluetooth to a Soundbrenner Pulse or audio out to a Peterson Bodybeat solo, but at that point, why not just use Ableton and a MIDI footswitch? The biggest appeal to me about the Aeros is the fact that you don’t need a DAW.
How?
There are few possible solutions I can think of, but I’m all ears for creative suggestions! The most elegant: if possible, allow a Soundbrenner Pulse to connect directly to the Aeros over Bluetooth. For this to really work well in our situation, we’d need to be able to connect at least two of them.
Another, hackier solution that I think will work based on reading the manual: the Peterson Bodybeat Solo seems to be just driven by a standard audio signal. I’m still waiting for my Aeros to arrive later this week, but it might be as simple as just routing the click to the aux out, splitting that, and then sending it to two Bodybeats. It means wires, but is worth a shot.
The Aeros can take or generate a midi clock which your device can use (in some way … perhaps with other devices helping it). The Aeros can also send a click sound to a separate output.
This has almost nothing to do with the Aeros and everything to do with whatever device you’re using to generate the haptic feedback.
Yeah, as stated in the post above, I can use the click routed to a separate output to trigger a Peterson BodyBeat (ordered one to try this), but those are wired.
I had skimmed this post earlier, but didn’t read it carefully enough:
Essentially, @Habo has already figured this out! He tried all the heavy-weight solutions with a DAW, running cables to the phone, and eventually got a pretty elegant setup working by using a MIDI to bluetooth bridge: Apr '19
It looks like from the video he posted that they’re not in sync, though. The phone app and pulse are behind the BeatBuddy.
This also now seems like a more reasonable feature request, though: rather than a specific product integration with Soundbrenner, which would be more niche, the request is to implement MIDI over Bluetooth so that the Aeros doesn’t require an additional piece of hardware to do this, like the Yamaha MD-BT01.
Implementing this would go beyond whatever use case I have with haptic feedback. Now, you could wirelessly interact with the Aeros from a DAW.
Hey all, first off OP issue would most likely not be very stable, because Bluetooth is not the best way to communicate MIDI sync, it is a limitation of the technology (no idea what the implications of BT 2.0 will be on this however). That being said, we are interested in looking into it and so we will be investigating.
That is correct, we hope to implement MIDI clock and master capabilities soon, but we have many tasks ahead of us before then.
I ended up solving this just using one of the alternatives in the original post: routing the click to aux out, connecting a headphone splitter, and connecting that to two Peterson Bodybeat Solo units (one for me, one for my drummer). It works pretty well.
I also picked up a used Soundbrenner Pulse to experiment with, but found the vibrations to be weaker and “blurrier” than the Bodybeat.