Lost Files

BeatBuddy General
#1

I worked up several songs yesterday and had them arranged in alphabetical order (49 total) in my BB gig project. I saved the project after every addition.

This morning I opened my project and had less than half the songs in my folder! They were still in alphabetical order but the others had just dropped off!

I have looked in every file on my computer for the lost songs and they just aren’t there. I didn’t save them to disk because I was going to continue today.

This same thing happened to me before. Needless to say I am having a very bad day. Can anyone give me any insight on this issue?

Thanks in advance, Pickinblues

#2

One potential cause is the use of any special characters to name songs.

#3

Yikes what a drag,So I take it you’ve just (if you use windows)gone to bottom left and done a search by typing in name of song that you made?

#4

Sorry to hear that but I have to agree with persist regarding special characters. I had a similar bad experience and thought I had lost many hours of work when I first started creating my set lists. I used periods, commas and/or apostrophes in naming the songs. Luckily I was able to recover them but only because I had saved them.

However, I keep seeing this problem mentioned on the forum way too often so apparently a lot of people have lost a lot of time and experienced a lot of frustration. That is never good from a marketing or sales standpoint.

If special characters are such a problem then I can’t understand why the developers don’t do a little data validation in BBM to pop up an error message if saving the song is going to cause problems. Just my opinion…

#5

Thanks everyone for your replies.
No, I did not use any special characters. I had read early on that that was a deal breaker. The thing is, I saved all the songs in alphabetical order and the first 19 were there. None of the rest were. They are GONE.
Also I saved the project after every addition because I didn’t want to lose anything.
Again, thanks for your responses!

#6

How many songs in the folder? Although the limit is 99 songs, it sounds like you may be way under that number. It also sounds like you’re you’re using the BBM to manage files, songs and folders but I have to ask anyway: have you been using the OS to save, copy or delete any files in your workspace?

You might check your bbworkspace to see if you’ve inadvertently saved your files to another project. Doesn’t sound likely, but it’s worth checking. Here’s a screen shot of my workspace. You can open the workspace by clicking on the Project Explorer underneath the Virtual Machine on the left pane. You can search using *.bbp for other projects.
[ATTACH]6574[/ATTACH]

Was your SD card in your computer by chance at the time you were saving those songs? Other thing I can think of is if you Save Project As . . . to another name or inadvertently to your SD card.

If none of these thoughts help, please contact me via PM.

#7

Thanks for your response.
Yes I was using BBM. I don’t understand “OS to save”. I used the “save project” option in BBM. My SD card was in BeatBuddy and it was not plugged into the computer. I had 49 songs in the folder and 19 are there today. I have looked in all files and folders and they are nowhere (workspace all other folder/files). As I stated, there are only 19 of the 49 songs. I know I am opening up the correct file/project because this is the only one that was alphabetical order, it is just incomplete.
Sorry! couldn’t figure out how to PM you!
Thanks again!

#8

Sounds like you’re doing everything correctly. I just started a conversation with you (PM).

#9

Let me warn you guys. Beatbuddy Softwares are not dependable. I has several corrupted sessions, project, lost songs etc. trired to edit one loop with there MIDI editor. Boom. All custom songs gone. Take a back up at every moment. Save with multiple name. Its a disaster software.

#10

Would you mind telling us
[LIST=1]
[]Which versions of the BeatBuddy Manager and firmware are you using?
[]Which operating system are you using?
[]Did you follow the setup instructions or tutorials for the BeatBuddy Manager?
[]Did you at any time use the operating system to perform functions that the BBM should perform?
[/LIST]
Unusual—but not entirely impossible for these types of things to happen if you’ve followed the steps or used help from this forum.

Can you offer more specific observations so that we can try to help? Right now you’ve not given us very much to go on.

#11

You were a lot more diplomatic than I was going to be.

#12

Arrrrgh. Same problem here. Had 61 songs, in alpha order in a folder called “Gig Ready.” Created a new song via import, and BLAM, 30 songs seem to be gone forever. Might have been an accidental special character in there (I honestly don’t know), but if so, what happens to those SNG files? They are deleted off the SD card and unrecoverable?

#13

BBM 1.65, updated firmware a month ago. Have never touched the SD card except through BBM.

#14

Try the following but before you do, what’s the name of the song you imported when this happened and what’s the name of the folder you imported the song to?
[LIST]
[]Delete the song you just imported
[]Does this make a difference?
[]If you didn’t sync your project to the SD card, hold off
[]Are the missing songs still on your pedal? If so, insert the SD card in your computer SD slot reader and use the BBM to open the project on your SD card and follow the prompts to save it to your bbworkspace with a new name.
[/LIST]

#15

I also imported songs that I purchased from the BB website. A few on Beatles and Eric Clapton were not working (I’m at work right now so don’t remember exactly which Beatle’s song). Eric Clapton “Tears in Heaven” did not want to play. It is frustrating when you purchase the songs and they aren’t there for whatever reason. But in light of those little issues I LOVE MY BB!!!

#16

The last song I created didn’t show up in my gig list. But alphabetically it might have been the next song, after all the ones that are still there. The songs are missing on the pedal as well, unfortunately. My suggestion for BBM functionality would be to have BBM prompt the user to back up the file periodically, or autosave it to bbworkspace\backup? I did look at the Undo list to see if maybe I could track down what happened, but nothing helpful there.

#17

Update: Last night, I could not find the missing SNG files by using BBM, looking on my computer and the pedal. But when I did a deep search via File Explorer today I found most of the missing songs, in a TMP directory. Interestingly, when I imported these back into a new project using BBM, I got early versions of the songs with names that reflected their original sources. (Many of these were based on Groove Monkee songs.) This was far better than creating them from scratch, so I feel quite lucky.

I also found some special characters in the song titles, leading me to believe that IS what caused the problem. I took all the special characters out, renamed the songs, and made a few final edits. Call this a success! I’m back virtually where I was when the problem occurred.

I don’t see a definition of special characters anywhere, so that’s one question for anyone who knows. But I’m playing it safe for now and taking out anything that isn’t a letter or number. A surprising number of songs have non-letter/number characters, so this isn’t trivial. Especially with material that I’ve purchased, like the Groove Monkee stuff.

Thanks for your help, and if I can add any more detail to clarify something for future reference (or code updates) please let me know.

#18

It’s always a good idea to export your songs to an archival location as you finish creating them. This will be very valuable in the event of future crashes. As you get more songs, you can export entire folders as an archive.

#19

Thanks I’ll have to try these suggestions.