Question about songs using more than 500 notes in a loop

BeatBuddy Help, Questions and Bugs
1

I bought a full midi file for a worship song from a legit website. I trimmed off all but channel 10 and the midi by itself plays great through the BBManager and the BeatBuilder. The whole-song midi file is greater than 500 notes so I used BBManager 1.60 to build a song using the whole-song midi as the only main loop. The song has no fills, transitions, outro or accents. I experimented with and without intros (see next para) to try to get it to play correctly.

The problem comes when I load the whole-song midi into a song with either an intro or I use the global count-in intro and try to play it as a whole song on the BBManager and the BB. The BB and the BBManager skip the first measure so I end up a measure short from the very beginning of the song. I tried playing around with the intro but that didn’t help. I finally got the song to play properly by adding an extra full measure at the front of the whole-song midi.

Is this the way the new 500+ note midi files are supposed to work or is the error ‘between the keyboard and the screen’ as they say?

FWIW, the reason I did the above with this particular song is because it has a couple of short measures in it - specifically it’s a 4/4 song with two 3/4 measures in it. The whole-song midi is OK with this because it’s just a bunch of notes. I couldn’t do this with either BeatBuilder or the new midi editor in BBManager because they don’t have any features to deal with short measures. I tried building short fills and transitions then putting them in songs but the BB wouldn’t play them short - it would add the missing beats back in or play just enough of the short fills to end the normal measure.

For those who are curious, the song is Whom Shall I Fear (God Of Angel Armies) by Chris Tomlin.

2

If I understand your question correctly I suspect it is the 3/4 measures that would mess it up.
Each section can have its own time signatures however if you have a full midi track with multiple time signature changes then I assume it is getting confused. Looks like you found the work around though - not sure if it is possible to get a fix as the BeatBuddy would then need to be able to read time signature changes and currently it can’t.

3

The 3/4 measures in there definitely affect the playback. if you have a single part, it has to line up, since you can’t change time sigs on the fly. you could change it to 2/4 if you want. the only downside is that the live metronome will only have two beats. i had one song that had two 5/4 measures, so instead of 66/4, i made the time sig 11/4!

4

Yes, it worked just fine because I had the whole song. The display metronome got off by a beat at each short measure but I don’t need the display if I’m playing a whole song. The only thing out of sorts was that the song ended two beats early.