The “missing” editor for the BeatBuddy—finally available

This is a brilliant editor for creating or editing beats of just a few bars in length, so it more than meets its primary objective. It could become my favourite midi editor , but ……

  1. missing triplets capability
  2. the fact that display and editor resolution is locked together is an issue when editing anything longer than a few bars.
  3. notes when moved always realign to the nearest whole beat at the display resolution so copy and paste is somewhat problematic.
    I can imagine that the one pass drum creators would love to see these limitations removed. In my case I use the same beats in both my BB and as rhythm patterns in my Boss loopers, which also depends on being able to combine patterns into a single midi file. (Or pull patterns apart :wink:

Thanks for your note Jim

On point 3, if you hold down the Cmd/Ctrl key you can move notes freely, not constrained to the editor resolution.
Your other points are on my radar and will likely be handled in future updates.

Hi Andrew,
Yes, this is fine when creating a pattern from scratch, but if you cut and paste a pattern, the copied version will snap to the current grid resolution. Any off grid notes must be re-edited. Ideally, when moving a group of notes as a block you need to be able to snap the first note of the group to the grid whilst conserving relative offsets.

Greetings Andrew and BB Community,

Just signed up for the online editor and, as many have also confirmed, I’ve found that the app definitely facilitates the editing of BB midi patterns. Great work!

Maybe a bit of a stretch in terms of a feature request, but are there any plans to build an auto-pilot module? Overall, I’m partial to controlling BB on the fly, but I think it’s a nice twist to have some one-pressers available during a set. Have seen a number of posts inquiring whether BB Manager will incorporate this capability at some point.

Thanks again, Andrew!

Yeah, I’ve been waiting for the Autopilot feature on the Beatbuddy. Not sure if possible with BBFF alone. I think it’s more of a firmware thing. Although an idea would be that BBFF to ‘compile’ parts or tracks into 1 midi file, then creates a brand new song file. For repeating parts, add a box for number of repeats? :grinning:

Perhaps singular could release documentation on how to configure settings for autopilot in songs. It’s my understanding that the firmware is already supporting it.

Yup! That would be nice. The last thing they released was the cowbell drum kit. Exciting times.

It was in the firmware but I believe it was removed again in subsequent firmware versions.

It wouldn’t be possible to do it in BBFF alone without firmware support.
Compiling a new song file is something I’ve thought of but would want to solidify and finish other things before I tackle that.

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Can you help me with a way to manage the SD card content and get new songs into BB? The BB Loader doesn’t start up on Mac Sonoma 14.3 and the BB Manager will not import the song, I get a parsing error or something. Also, it doesn’t appear to be able to simple drag songs onto the SD Card on the Mac. Same issue with this software. I’m a new user, but I’ve never been able to add a new SNG to the Beat Buddy. There must be a way on Sonoma 14.3

Thanks in advance.

Never, mind, it’s working now. I think the .sng file I was trying to load from a forum wasn’t loading, maybe something wrong with it or something.

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Hi Andrew. Appreciate your feedback on the potential auto pilot / song compilation feature!

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IIRC the blocker for AutoPilot was the lack of support in the old Beat Buddy Editor.

Perhaps if BBFF and SIngular Sound worked on this together, AutoPilot could be released.

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Hi Andrew,
I found an interesting little bug in the app. I was trying to combine individual beats together to form a single pattern, and then save that to a midi file. The resultant file should have been 33 bars long, but in the process of copying and pasting patterns I inadvertently included some extra notes beyond the length of the pattern that I was trying to create. When I reduced the pattern definition to the desired length, these extra notes were apparently still present, but invisible to the editor. Writing out the midi file resulted in a pattern length which was more than twice the desired length. A bit of a corner case in terms of the use model, but I thought you might be interested.
Cheers,
Jim

Thanks Jim, I’ll investigate that and fix it in an upcoming release.

Jim, I found the problem and have fixed it.

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:+1:

<NerdAlert>

Was it the Kobayashi Maru?

</NerdAlert>

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Hi guys,

We want to thank Andrew for the incredible work he’s done on this editor, we have been closely eyeing it since it appeared on the forum and were greatly impressed with the application and his professionalism.

We’d also like to thank all of the deeply committed and passionate customers that have given us crucial feedback over the years. It has challenged us to do better.

We are happy to announce that the BBFF is now the BeatBuddy Manager Online application. It is free to use and open to the public, no sign-up required.

We have tested the application thoroughly and find it to be working remarkably well, we apologize that we couldn’t announce or talk about it sooner, but here we are!

Have fun! :musical_score: :musical_note: :notes:

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Wow this is a welcome addition! just wondering if Andrew got hired to the dev team? I really like the way he handles fixes and bugs. He’s very responsive and gets the job done.

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