So far the BeatBuddy seems great. I am waiting impatiently for the manager software, and so i have some questions while I wait. I plan to use the BeatBuddy in a hip hop context with samples as well as drum sounds. Therefore, how some of the internal workings of the software and firmware are very important to me.
As we now know the midi file note limit (500 per pattern), i was hoping you would share some of the other specifications for us. I am wondering how many drum sounds we may load per drum kit. Besides that what is the limit on size? How much memory does the beat buddy have for active sounds? I dont mean what can be stored on the SD card, but size limit on the total number of samples as well as the individual sound size limit. Also, what about choke groups? will i be able to have my closed hat cut my open hat?
Throw us a bone here while we wait for the manager to arrive.
I believe 500 MIDI notes are a limit for either one song part, one fill, one transition, intro or outro. As you can add multiple song parts/fills/etc into one BeatBuddy song, you will be able to have more than 500 notes overall distributed between different song parts. I myself was unable to load a very big MIDI file, but it was ok when I split it into several shorter ones. (I could be mistaken in this one though)
What I know for sure - is that BeatBuddy has an active 100Mb of memory to have WAV files loaded from a drumset. You have no limit on the number of MIDI notes covered, only a total of 100Mb. Thus, you can have only 10 MIDI notes each having WAV files for 10Mb, or you can cover 100 notes with only 1Mb of WAV samples per note.
While I personally had no idea about what choke group was (while I was exploring the software, and I already guessed what it is now), but there definitely was this setting on each of the MIDI note. So you will be able to choke your open hat with a successive closed hat for sure.
That sounds pretty good. 100Mb per song of samples could do quite a bit. Here is another couple of questions about the midi aspects. Are there other midi messages which the beatbuddy can send besides start /stop/ continue. For instance could the beatbuddy send a message to the other devices synced to it, telling the other devices to change to the next pattern when we trigger a pattern change on the beatbuddy? And also, can the sounds be externally triggered (say via a midi drum controller) via midi in on the beatbuddy?