I hate to be a whinger but I’ve got to say I’m really disappointed with things at the moment.
I’ve been trying to edit midi files in Logic and load them into the pedal and it’s an absolute nightmare. The files are not loading into Logic properly and then when I get them right and put them into the pedal they don’t play right there.
I just don’t have the time to coax and tickle this thing to get it to work. I was hoping that for €330 that I would not have to, that all this would would have been worked out prior to its release.
I would agree with others that Beatbuddy was released rather too soon onto the market.
I know it will come good and that the software’s is being worked on but I just feel the need to express my disappointment and let off a bit of steam. I’ve been struggling with this for weeks now and had originally bought it to do a small concert at my daughter’s creche.
Unfortunately it’s just not going to be ready now (concert this afternoon) so it’s going to be guitar and voice only, no drums.
ETA Oh yeah and the tempo indication is all messed up too in the manager software. Unintelligible.
Yes, I totally agree with you that editing MIDI files in external editor is inconvenient. We’re just not quite there. But eventually will be.
The pedal offers a lot of pre-loaded beats that are quite usable. Or at least some of them
To be honest, if you hold your product for far too long, you may run into noone would want it several years later. In my opinion, BeatBuddy has totally hit the spot when to be released, though I’d rather it to be released even earlier.
Couple of points: try Charles Spencer’s brilliant midi editor that he created specifically for the BB - much easier than using Logic. You’ll find to here:
and seeing as you are a Mac user (and the tempo value is a known issue in an earlier version of the BBM for Mac) download the latest version of the Mac BB Manager here:
You’ll find things much easier with these two upgrades to your workflow. Especially as within the midi editor above you can save a part of an imported midi file by selecting it and hitting Save Selection. So when I want to create a song in the BB and the drum parts are particular to that song (as in most of Led Zeppelin’s stuff for example) I find the midi version of the song online (there are hundreds of songs available) and select and save each section I need including fills and transitions without leaving the midi editor. And then I just load them in to the BB Manager in the standard way. Finally I synchronise everything with the BB SD card - I use a card reader rather than connecting the BB each time because the BB is on the floor connected to audio outputs etc. and I don’t have a long enough USB cable. The card reader approach works fine - you can simply remove the card from the BB whenever you need to update it, you don’t have to power off the BB to do so.
Thanks for the info guys. I appreciate what you’re saying Daef, it can’t be easy working out the best time to release something like this. And yes there is a lot of useable stuff already on it, I’m just impatient to be able to easily tweak it.
I hadn’t noticed the BBManager update (I did look) so will download that now. Will also have a go with Charles’ midi editor
I have to be honest and say I had another go with the midi files shortly after my post above and did get it working eventually. It did help letting off steam on the forum though, thanks for letting me do that
Looking forward to things getting better and better with the Beatbuddy!
I saw the link to beat builder and it’s a JAR file… I’m brand new to this MIDI stuff… It doesn’t look like a program or a file… Do I need another piece of software to run this??
To run Beat Builder, you’ll need java (ver 1.7 or 1.8) running on your computer. Beat Builder was developed as third party software by @CharlesSpencer.
