Hello everyone,
Regarding the original question of whether or not the BBManager will ever be updated. The answer is yes. That includes both Windows and Mac.
Now to answer the question of why it is taking so long, the simple and concise explanation is that the BBManager has been programmed in such a way that it has become extremely difficult to fix. We would fix one thing, and 3 more problems would pop up, and the cycle continued over and over. Any programmers in this forum could probably relate and share similar experiences in their past projects whenever trying to fix “spaghetti code”.
We are currently rebuilding it from the ground up, as that is the only solution as far as we can tell, and we came to this reluctant realization relatively recently.
Longer explanation for those who want more details:
In repeated attempts to patch up the BBManager and all of its flaws, we have gone through about 4 separate programming teams since 2015. After each team seemed to not make significant progress on fixing the critical issues, we’d search for a different team to replace them that we hoped could accomplish what was needed. Searching for and getting a new team up to speed on the project takes significant time as well. This is 4 separate attempts, in which we invested a ton of the company’s earnings into this one individual project.
This whole process has been VERY frustrating for us as well. Because not only are we spending time waiting for it just like the rest of the BeatBuddy community, we have invested so much of the company’s funds on top of that. Funds that we could have used to work on additional products - but we felt it was critical to fix the software for our original flagship product.
It doesn’t serve us in any way to neglect the BBManager. Most of the online bad reviews we received are in regards to our software, which has been (at least until you get used to using it) a royal PITA to newcomers. As the CEO of Singular Sound it is a painful thing admit, but I recognize it. Aside from personal feelings, from a pure business perspective, we not only want it to work to its full capacity without problems, we NEED it to work to its full capacity without problems.
More importantly, we care about our customers. We care a lot. We want everyone to be happy with our products even long after purchases were made, whether that’s last year, or 5 years ago, or longer. We are all part of the same musical community. We care about your satisfaction whether or not you continue to purchase products from us. We will give the same level of support to the guy who purchased the BeatBuddy once in the Indiegogo campaign years ago as we give to the guy who instantly purchases anything we make available the day it becomes available.
As it stands now, we are rebuilding the BBManager from the ground up. We are working on a simplified version of it, with none of the issues and required workarounds existing in the current BBManager. Once we have solidified this version, we will work on developing more complex features, hopefully reaching a point of all the fancy bells and whistles. It is one of our primary focuses right now. We were very careful before starting this new version not to repeat the mistakes of our previous attempts and have consulted with several software experts to make sure we build a solid foundation.
In addition, we are continuing work on the current BB Manager in case we somehow manage to fix enough of the bugs to make it a worthwhile improvement that we can release while the new version gets built. We made the original version open source so any programmers who would like to try their hands at fixing some challenging bugs are more than welcome to join us in this effort.
I completely understand everybody’s frustration. I feel that frustration as well. But I also feel a deep responsibility to you all to live up to my promises and we all are working our asses off to make it happen.
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