That’s a pity. A loop-able Intro would be useful for starting a worship session, where you want something light but don’t know how long you want it go on. And you don’t want to repeat this Intro beat during the song or medley of songs.
What is so special about the intro? The intro is normally just a drum fill, you dont want that looping round and round. If you want a e.g a hihat beat for your intro and have it loop then you would need to add it to the first part, and then add the other parts. What I would do in this situation is try to organise the parts so I could use that “intro” during a bridge or another part of the song. It all depends how structured you need the song.
There’s nothing special about the Intro. I think many people just disable it as they don’t want to start a song with a fill. Hence it’s kinda of a wasted feature. So instead of it behaving as a fill, if it loops, it will be more useful. Imagine someone trying to play “Hotel California” live version on the BB, with the long instrumental intro - a loopable Intro would be useful.
How about disabling the intros (or deleting them), then adding an empty song part before part 1 (which will now be part 2), and placing the ‘intro’ file on the main loop of your newly created part, and have that as the only file for that whole first song part? The “intro” will be looped until you hold down the pedal to transition to the next song part, but no transition will be heard, because there is no transition. See example below…
But then you cannot change from last songpart to “first songpart”, without playing the “Intro”… For your example, it would be better to put first part into Transition space, and let first main Part unused, last Transition would be followed by first MAIN Part… So Intro could be played as long as you hold the pedal, and in the song it would not be used again (you then could change between both songparts and Transition would only play in the beginning…)
But unfortunately it is not possible to keep a Main Part Space empty…
Another thing with Intro is, it dont sends Midi start, so a loopable Intro space (e.g. looping while holding) makes also sense…
I think using any main part to be the ‘intro’ wouldn’t work if you don’t want that ‘intro’ to be played again later in the song. In terms of how the looping Intro can be activated is either by (1) holding down the main pedal to keep the Intro looping, or (2) have a selector in BB Manager, for the user to select whether the Intro in that particular song should loop or not (whereby exiting the Intro loop into main part 1 is through another press of the main pedal). I guess the latter is more elegant, as you don’t have to hold down the pedal all the time during the Intro loop.
Just some ideas for the BB programmers to work on…
To keep it compatible with old versions, or people who want a fixed length intro you could add a setting to the foot switch settings menu like this:
Intro
No Intro
Loop Intro
Intro would work as is does currently - fixed number of measures then into song
Loop intro would keep playing the intro until the foot switch was held, then play a transition (if present) and move in to the main song.