I have a MIDI drum track that I’ve created in Sonar and saved to a .mid file. The drum track is a one click play straight through. How do I know get it into BeatBuddy Manager?
I’ve been doing something similar and am still learning. I had some success in doing the following.
I used two files, one click track with a count-in (this is midi track quarter notes on each of the four beats of a 4/4 signature song). The second file has the actual drum portion of the song.
In Sonar I created the two files making sure that the track was assigned to channel 10. I then saved the file but did not use the default CWP format. Instead I used the “save as” pull down and selected “MIDI format 1”.
Look for the video tutorials that show you how to import songs and use the BeatBuddy Manager to create a new song and then import the midi tracks as suggested below.
To make it work as a single play through song, I place the count in track in the first loop slot and I placed the song drum part in the outro fill slot. I press the pedal once to start the count-in then press it twice to start the song drum track. Since it is in the outro fill slot the midi track plays once then stops.
The only reason to do the count-in track is because you have to have something in the first loop section of the song.
As I said I’m a newbie so there may be better ways of doing this. Good luck and let me know if you discover a better way.
Hey thanks a lot. I appreciate you as a newbie responding…kinda funny that the masses that I would assume know haven’t.
I will check out the video.
hmmmmm… where are the video tutorials??
The masses usually don’t respond when they’ve already provided answers to similar questions. 
- Spend some time browsing the various sections of this forum.
- Get familiar with the search function too as it will help you learn and understand how to use the BeatBuddy as a system.
- The most important thing to do though is to jump right in and get your feet wet. Learning comes from trying and (occasionally) failing; once you get the hang of it, you will succeed more often than you fail.
- The videos and tutorials will help you get the basics down. Once you’ve demonstrated a willingness to figure out the basics, users might be more willing to answer questions that haven’t been asked before.
Wow! Alrighty then…
Perhaps someone could ‘kindly’ point me to where the tutorial videos are so I can find out how to get my MIDI file into BeatBuddy Manager.
Thanks!
Here are some of the forum resources I’ve hit: Tutorial for BBManager version 1.5.0
And check out Psalm40’s reply to this thread which references loading midi files into a song He has a lot of video tutorial links in his signature lines: groove monkey confused
I know it is a lot of data and I got to it as persit noted through a bit of trial and error.
Here is a five minute attempt to talk through the most basic steps which are covered somewhere in the tutorials above:
- Open BBManager
- Make sure the “Songs” tab is selected in the right pane below the BeatBuddy graphic
- In the menu bar, select “Songs” -> “New Song”
- Double click on the words “New Song” and name your song.
- Set the default tempo by typing in the tempo in the leftmost pane of the song window.
- Set the default Drum Set using the pull down selection option located in the leftmost pane of the song window.
- Click on the “…” button below the words “Main Loop”.
- In MSWindows, an explorer window will pop up. Navigate to the location of your midi file and load it
- Use the virtual BeatBuddy (the graphic in the upper left of the BBManager) to test the beat.
I’ve found that I’ve had to troubleshoot at this point. Sometimes the beats don’t translate, a different drum kit is needed, the velocities of the drum parts aren’t right, etc. You might have to play with the file in Sonar (or other DAW) to get it right.
In my example above, I would load the count-in track in the “Main Loop” and click on the “…” button below the words “Outro Fill” to load my main song.
- Sync you project to your SD card (also found in the videos).
Again, I’m still learning and learning how to learn with the forum and search feature. Good luck!
