Hi All,
Got my BB in the mail this weekend and have been messing around with it a bit. Love it so far. I am now trying to understand the basic process for creating/using OP files. Clearly a one press solution would be the easiest way to start integrating the BB into my performances. Just drums… not looking for bass or keys at the moment. Also, I’m not asking for specific technical details here. I’m assuming there are already threads and/or resources out there that I can read for that. (I’ve read a few already.) A link to a few of the better ones would be appreciated, tho. 
Anyway, so I don’t waste time, I’m wondering if I’m understanding OPs correctly so far:
OPs are simply one big midi file containing the entire performance of a song (intro, contiguous sections, fills, outro, etc.).
I would need to create a new song in the BBM and assign the OP midi to the intro section, with nothing else in the other sections. Copy the song to the BB. Hit the pedal once, and jam away. Or assign it to the outro section, tap and double tap, and it would end by itself.
That seems straight forward.
As to the creation of an OP midi file, the threads I’ve skimmed so far refer to finding an existing midi for the song, stripping out everything you don’t want, then tailoring it for the BB. If I took this approach, I’m assuming that once loaded into the BBM I would then assign it a BPM value and a drum kit. Also, I assume the channels referenced in the OP midi would have to be the same ones used by default BB songs. If it referenced a non-default channel, I’d also have to create a new drum kit for the song that included that non-default channel (or something like this).
If I got that right, is there a free midi-editor that most people use or recommend (Windows-based)?
Lastly, there seems to be a lot of great midi content included with the BB. If I wanted to take a stock BB song (e.g. Country 4 – Shuffle) and create an OP version of it, can that be done? Could I simply grab the individual midi files used by that song in BB and copy/paste them into a midi editor, then repeat/arrange/merge them within the editor into a single performance?
Any thoughts or comments appreciated. Hoping I’m on the right track and can save some time with a few suggestions from more experienced BB users.
Bonus Musing: All this makes me wonder if Singular Sound ever thought of adding a “Macro” feature to the BB (or the BBM), like the one found in MS Office. I could do much of what I want to do with OPs if I could simply capture a set of foot controller signals during the performance of an existing BB song. Once captured, I could save that “Macro” to the BB as an “OP macro file”. Load it, hit the pedal once to launch it, and it would re-perform the BB song using the captured foot controller signals. That would make life SO much easier. One can dream, right? (This is where someone points me to a simple solution I should have known existed…)
–Jimmay