My email to support@singularsound.com

Aeros Loop Studio
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Just tan FYI
I have just sent an email to BB support:

Hi support

I am beatbuddy owner for 3 weeks. Beyond this I am playing music for 30 years, am dipl. Sound technician Logic certified, Apple Certified and for 20 years in the IT business.

One could therefore say I am a little bit advanced in using any hard or software around midi with mac.

Further more I am working for Apple and am a customer service manager.

And here is the issue:

I purchased the beatbuddy as a great and easy way to play beats to bass or guitar.

As such your marketing promise includes a fully and “great” user forum with user content.

Well lets start with this: I found out you “migrated” the forum which makes it now have no content due to unprofessional migration mistakes and the content that is there is due to lack of structure hardly searchable.

Ok, fine then - I thought- I will make myself.

There is just one issue: BB-Manager

Not only is it most akward to use on mac due its non-existing structure or interface comformaty, no it also is so buggy that just today I lost 16 !!! hours of my work without any possibility of regaining that content despite backup sds I made and manual backups of the folder structure.

When inquiring in the user forum you use in your purchasing promise I find that EVERYBODY in this forum has given up even to ask you for fixes as they are simply not provided.

I learned that since 2018 there was no update or fix for even the most obviouse BB-manager issues.

So Singular sound on one end does claim a propriatary system as a base for their product but then entirely fails to live up to maintaining it. This is as you could easily hand source code and dbs to the forum to make it open source. A step that would not only be most wise but also plausible considering we are talking a protocoll (midi) that is on the market since my grandpa made music.

So what is going on? You do not develop. Your (at least apple) platform is unusible but main part of the produ ct I just spent 300€ on purchasing.

I am highly frustrated and asking anyone results in letargy.

When will you release a fully integrated apple BB-Manager or releave the source for fixing it within the forum?

This is inacceptable.

I bought this for making music and not for getting aggitated about bad programming.

Looking forward to your soon answer

Regards

Andy

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You didn’t ask them about helping you recover your songs?

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there is nothing to recover.

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Are you trolling? The forum migrated almost a year ago, and it is a vibrant community. The forum software is not great, but the people are.

And while we’re complaining, how come every time I get a third nag note on my iPhone my apps all start dying?

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@bandyman:

The loss of content was not due to erroneous migration of the forum content, it happened prior to the migration. It was due to a backup of the server that did not go well. It was a mistake we paid dearly for, as anything added to the resources section prior to the backup was lost permanently. The party responsible for this mistake is no longer working for the company, and that decision was made exclusively due to this error. We will not let this type of mistake to happen again.

Yup, this has been our Achilles’ heal since the beginning. It is our weakest point. There are many reasons that this is the case, and we have unfortunately have not successfully fully solved this yet.

You are 100% right. There are some really aggravating bugs that have not been fixed yet, particularly the one where periods and commas cause songs to disappear. We do mention this in the user manual twice, in a big red box on pages 11 and 12: https://singularsound-publicly-downloadable.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/manuals/BeatBuddy_Manager_v1.6.4_v1.6.5_Quickstart_Guide.pdf

There is a possible recovery method that may help to recover lost content, @persist mentioned to me that he is PM’ing you about it.

In general though we agree with you, all these bugs and workarounds are aggravating and frustrating. This is definitely not what anyone deserves, much less paying customers.

Which is why we will be doing this -

We are going to release the BBManager as open source. We want to do it right, so we are organizing an official programming team to lead the open source project, and we hope to have it open source within the next few months. We want to solidify the team first before we release it out in the open.

I know how frustrating this is. It frustrates us too, it doesn’t serve at all to have our customers be constantly annoyed at us. The BBManager is one of our top priorities in the coming months.

There will be more positive updates to follow. Please bear with us while we fix this very crucial aspect of the BeatBuddy experience. We are going fix this, we promise.

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Wow. Hopefully this makes BBM better for everybody!

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We certainly hope so. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t make things a hundred times better. Good things are coming. :sunglasses:

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Thank you support.

Thank you for your answer here.

Sorry if I misunderstood something. However: This is how it was communicated to me and is to be found in the forum: Story-Line “content lost because of migration” No recovery

I am happy to hear, that you are working on open sourcing. This is definately a good and right step.

Go, put some more severity to this promise and project by involving this forum right now and post progress and milestones as well as an ETA for the release. This way we all know you mean it.

Thanks ahead and kind regards

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Not sure why this is going to take several months??!!! And then in several months it will be the same old, oh we have not had time, resources, working on something else, more silly emails, blah de blah de blah!! hahaha, the excuses get better - “We want to solidify the team” what the??? I mean, what exactly does THAT mean?

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@bandyman I can definitely see how this was not communicated very clearly. We will definitely keep everyone in the loop as we get closer to the actualization of the BBManager open sourcing. Updates to follow.

It means that we have a new group of programmers who need to get familiar with the software, and they need to build a solid foundation of familiarity with the BBManager before they take the lead on the open source project.

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Well this isn’t just a MAC issue but a Beat Buddy issue in general.

Open Source has served Reaper pretty well over the years. However, Reaper is a excellent DAW at the lower price end. Reaper has 10000x more user’s than Beat Buddy ever will. Your logic in making it open source could take years if ever to get it fixed. Most of those doing Open Source programming for Cockos, have been in the DAW business for a long time. Open Source not a good option because of that.

We go on to “We have a new group of programmers” Ok just guessing the old programmer left. Not good. At that point may I suggest… trash the old Beat Buddy Manager and have them write a new program. They wont be learning the old mistakes and they can provide a truly Windows or Mac solution. This will save the programmers LOTS of time and you Lots of money! Windows and MAC offer more call up commands than the current software. I say this as I know most all of my Windows programs including Windows offer more options than ABORT. Reason I mention that is that I am unable to backup or sync and my only option in the software is to ABORT… wrong answer guys Window has a built in routine that allows you to skip the file it copies to a memory card.

At any rate, it sad that you have a first rate product with 3rd world support for it.

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Open Source will be a failure for beat buddy for very obvious reason least I say they have a very unique product here.

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This is encouraging that you’re planning to open source it. I might even contribute to the open source project. What language(s) is BBM written in?

It’s also encouraging that you’ve added additional developers.

I’m hoping open sourcing and adding additional developers will address the concerns of all these negative posts.

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I support your thinking DK.

Still I do think that a good open source community can work miles in no time.
Everyone I spoke to in this forum was either IT, Music production or Program/Project management or programmer.

I believe in open source for this. But I am with you in around:

Yes: Learning the buggy programming of the curren BB is a waste of time
Yes: Preserving the current UI would be preserving the ´80s
Yes: New would be better.

Then again: Apple offers a full SDK for Mac programs that easily fixes all the UI issues with just opening the SDK. This is the first step.
Then: If the source code is released ANY UI made in this way could trigger the database changes needed. Lets say: realistically (thinking this is not a very complicated tool by far) a good db programmer could create that link to those functions in a weekend. (and might even want to sell his work on the appstore making a few quit?)
Alpha/Beta testing can be done here and I would be the first to go for that: 3 months stuff works.
For the Midi-editor: Just create an interface for 3rd party midi editors. There are millions out there which work better (create API). Or simply re-map the current stuff to work with existing DAWs… not so hard.

There is no point re-inventing the wheel. most of the needed is around for 10 years or more and can just be harvested. Also: Stuff can be ported from the Linux community (i.e. midi editors)

I am positive. Let´s get it done and let´s not build obstacles before we know what is coming :wink:

best

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Thanks for your reply

Well I hope you are right and I am wrong about the Open Source programmers flocking to help you out :slight_smile: I don’t see it because of the uniqueness of the pedal. I use several different open source programs and the one which relates to music being Reaper. Look at their target audience, then look at Beat Buddy’s audience. Most of Reapers programmers are coming from other DAW’s for various reason. One I know personally has recommended changes to his management which they were not open to. He came over to Reaper and made the change quickly and the whole Reaper community was excited. Again hope you are right.

Microsoft has a SDK as well. Sadly I don’t think it was even used in the writing of the Beat Buddy Manager. Granted I am not a programmer (I like the sun too much) but the programmers I have come to know laugh at BBM.

Midi editing, I know you guys added it because of pressure from the users. Well I’ve used a lot of midi editors and the one in BBM is the worst. I wouldn’t waste time with it. There are 3rd party programmers that would include their already done already refined midi programs. If not go without one. There are a ton of freeware midi editors or my preference would be Reaper again.

Beta testing, well the only downside to that is doing it locally you are working in an enclosed environment. You cant replicate my or any other users systems and / or hardware. Over the past 20 years I have been on various MS Beta Teams. Mostly it was a waste of my time as either they never got back to me about issues or they just ignored them. That changed with Windows 10. While doing the beta on Windows 10, MS got back with me within hours. Needless to say, Windows 10 was probably the best rollout Microsoft ever has had since DOS. That wasn’t an easy trick with all the changes they had made and ver 8 was just there for financing Windows 10.

The concerning issue here really is… all of these have been a problem for an excessive amount of time. What is management thinking? Same complaints and problems and other than the new forum which was totally not thought out, they haven’t upgraded BBM since when? I’m not sure but I think the last upgrade was the midi editor. It does resemble something from the 80’s. LoL.

Need management’s buy in and support!

I hope only good thing for BeatBuddy (I’ve only had it a week) lol

v/r
Ben

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I wouldn´t take MS for a reference ha…

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Glad to see some forward movement with BB Manager. Thank you!

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…said the guy who says he’s an Apple Support manager!

:slight_smile:

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Great words, I sincerely hope they are meaningful… but we’ve been hearing about improvements for years and have seen nothing. I suppose we’ll see if this is just more talk.

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I have lived both worlds my friend :wink: and am sure to live in a
the better one at this point. The rest comes down to ideology not to facts

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